SOURCE: “Poetry in Review,” in Yale Review, Vol. 87, No. 4, October, 1999, pp. 154–64.

In the following excerpt, Muske offers a positive assessment of Repair. According to Muske, “These poems demand everything of the reader, and thus they are political and social in the most profound reconfigurative sense.”

What is often said about C. K. Williams is that he is “Whitmanesque”—he's got that Whitman-like long line, that Whitmanish turn of phrase, the expansive vision. It would be pointless to deny Walt's influence on this work, but finally, the comparison yields little in terms of getting under the skin of the poems. Williams's new book, Repair, again situates him in America (or an American's Europe) once again—and again the reader prepares to enter the holy precincts of the Bible—Psalms—Whitman—Ginsberg—where pious homage is paid to the Long Line, that great big democratic yak-vista.

Frankly, the long line...