This is the eighth book--and the most various yet--from a major American poet. For his two previous books, a generous Selected Poems and The Vigil, C.K. Williams received great acclaim, including the PEN/Voelcker Award and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. Repair represents an extraordinary outpouring of nearly forty new poems.

Williams's subjects, again, are love, death, the secrets kept and the pain unexpressed among intimates, social disorder and despair, the waywardness of thought, and the metaphoric exultation of the natural world. A long poem about the 1960s, "King," ponders the confused motives and racial misunderstandings of that period, and our own.

Here is a poet in full maturity, transforming everything he considers, and celebrating, as the final poem suggests, "invisible mending," those moments of forgiveness, grace, and repair which are a compensation for our attentiveness and patience.

(From the book jacket)