SOURCE: “Masters of Transience,” in Poetry, Vol. CLXIII, No. 3, December, 1993, pp. 158–70.

In the following review of A Dream of Mind, Howard concludes that Williams's shorter poems mitigate the shortcomings of his longer poems in “this uneven collection.”

“The poems flow from the hand unbidden,” writes Derek Mahon, “and the hidden source is the watchful heart.” C. K. Williams has called his tenth collection A Dream of Mind, and to an extent rare in contemporary poetry his new poems enact the dialectics and tease out the nuances of analytical thought. But these are also poems of the watchful heart, in which the poet's insecurities, his fear of death and his yearning for religious belief, come under the scrutiny of intuitive awareness, and the less admissible feelings are made known. Thus, in “The Insult,” as the narrator walks in the forest, he recalls an insult incurred “a continent and years...