SOURCE: A review of The Vigil, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 4, Autumn, 1997, p. 794.

In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of The Vigil.

The Vigil follows C. K. Williams's Selected Poems by only three years. The poet has published seven volumes since 1969, and perhaps a review should note that ten of the forty-four poems in the new collection were published in the Selected Poems, where they appeared among a group designated as “New Poems.” Since there are no textual changes in the poems as reprinted, one can only suppose that the poet wishes to emphasize their importance in his oeuvre. And indeed, at least five of these poems are among his finest: “Interrogation II,” “Time: 1976” and its successor “Time: 1978,” and especially “Villanelle of the Suicide's Mother” and “Hercules, Deianira, Nessus.” The last is a splendid version of the story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, book 9, in which...