SOURCE: “Masks and Passions,” in Poetry, Vol. CLIV, No. 1, April, 1989, pp. 29–48.

In the following excerpt, McClatchy praises Williams's collected work in Poems, 1963–1983, drawing attention to Williams's distinct style and social consciousness.

To accompany C. K. Williams's prize-winning 1987 collection, Flesh and Blood, his new publisher has now gathered his four earlier books into a comprehensive volume. Poems, 1963–1983 includes the long out-of-print Lies (1969), minus two poems; I Am the Bitter Name (1971), from which three poems have been deleted, and the order of its first and second (of four) groupings of poems reversed; then a chapbook of translations from Issa called The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling, first published in 1983 but actually written in the mid-seventies and so placed between his two early and his two mature books; and finally, complete, the remarkable With Ignorance (1977) and Tar (1983), the best work of his career to date, the work whose distinctive style and...