SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 589–90.

In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of Williams's Selected Poems.

Selected Poems represents C. K. Williams very well at the height of his career. He has become known for his poems in long lines (up to twenty-five syllables) that run across the page and necessarily carry over. Reading him is an unusually active process; the eye follows the lines with a kind of fascination; what are they leading to? At times the process of reading almost seems an end in itself. However, Williams is not concerned merely with the virtuosity of lines much longer than those normally written in English. Among the thirteen new poems in this collection there is a remarkable version of the story of Hercules, Deianira, and Nessus from Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 9. Williams here comes close to reproducing...