SOURCE: “The Disparates Fuse,” in Parnassus, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1990, pp. 115–35.

In the following review of Flesh and Blood and Poems, 1963–1983, Santos examines the development of Williams's distinct poetic voice and style from the 1960s to present.

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After two decades of wrestling by turns with discursive and dramatic modes—a struggle chronicled in Poems, 1963–1983—C. K. Williams developed a voice almost instantly identifiable; and in Flesh and Blood, his fifth collection, he has devised a form supple enough to accommodate both tendencies. Each of its 147 eight-line poems is set in a highly alliterative, double pentameter line—normally ten strong stresses played against an unpredictable number of syllables—that recalls Old English or Hopkins's sprung rhythm. To anchor that line, and to save it from bombast, Williams employs a gritty, streetwise realism that assumes the character—and charged vernacular—of the common man. This overlay of the colloquial onto the line's...