William Carlos Williams Books

My point of view: I have a PhD in American Lit, but do not currently work in academia. I write from the perspective of an educated enthusiast.

I have not read any other book of his selected essays, yet I am bold enough to suggest one start with this collection. WCW was a rather philosophical poet, and knowing what he thought helps one to understand his poetry. These essays, which span decades and come from a number of publications (as well as some unpublished), allow the reader to see his various perspectives on politics, history, music and poetry. This is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to engage WCW at something above the college sophomore level.

THE SPANISH AMERICAN ROOTS has me wondering why it isn't more satisfying and persuasive, since its author, Julio Marzan, has wonderful excitement and knows his Williams like the back of his hand, always pulling out the exact right referent with which to back his argumentation. Every page has another fine quotation and an equally fine application, and one couldn't be more sympathetic to the author's cause, which makes perfect sense the more one thinks about it.

Yet how does Williams' Spanish heritage manifest itself in his poetry? There Marzan has an uphill struggle on his hands. Emotionally it makes sense, since a lot of WCW's writing seems to operate on a double matrix, there's an Anglo rectitude Marzan identifies with WCW's father, "William George," and there's an extra element, something the skews the poetry into a previously unknown (in American poetry) range of modernism and Marzan pins this as the Puerto Rican strain, for Williams' mother was born and reared in Mayaguez. What makes it difficult for Marzan is that Williams only rarely acknowledges anything Spanish and when he does, it's almost always with that distant reach of the "other." "Those people." Himself as a "Gringo." It's hard to follow all of Marzan's arguments, mainly because one doesn't always want to go where he wants to go, i.e., tracking down all references to the "jungle" or the "fertile" or the "dark side" (the duende) in Williams' work and invariably he sees all these strains as the Spanish at work in WCW and it all starts to seem, if not reductive, then a bit retardataire, like saying Rita Hayworth was an appealing dancer because she was Mexican. In fact all the worst aspects of Williams, especially his sexual politics, become Puerto Rican in Marzan's reading and I don't know if he realizes how compromised his Latin American WCW becomes. No, I'm wrong there; he does appreciate how much his reading complicates our previously beneficent image of Williams, but again, the evidence is scant enough to make you think, maybe, maybe not.

He says this is not a biography but rather a book that will aid the biographer of the future. May that writer come along who can shed light on Marzan's tantalizing hints. He's got the sizzle, but where's the steak?

These are two charming eclectic collections of love poetry, on CD with accompanying books, which really ought to be purchased and reviewed together. The 10 actors, all talented, also present a varied lot. Each poem and each performance was enjoyable, some romantic, some funny, some thoughtful, some sad, ranging from modern to one written in the 3rd Century and all in between. Many of the poems were a surprise and the very fact of their inclusion was enchanting, for instance Simon Prebble's charming rendition of The Owl and the Pussycat, a poem whose acquaintance I made 50 years ago and which remains dear to me, on the Voices of Marriage CD. I reacted differently to each poem, to each actor, and to each performance and would assume that most listeners would also have highly personal reactions. There were many poems I was especially delighted to hear, as they were old favorites, others because they were newly met ones. There were two actors I found irresistible, whose every performance was wonderful: Simon Prebble, long a favorite, and Michael Wager, new to me. Most of the others were also superb. There were some who were decidedly less entrancing, however each actor did at least one poem no one else could have done better and every poem can be enjoyed as it was performed, on its own merits. The more I listen, the more I find to enjoy, even including the order in which the poems are presented. In all, this is a wonderful idea.

If your a fan of the great poet or unfamiliar this is an excellent work. Contains not only his poetry, but a fine selection of prose. I highly reccomend this book .

Reading a work of James Carlos Blake is like being invited to a gourmet banquet for the mind and Handsome Harry is no exception. He is one of the few authors where I read and savor every word. The characters, scenes and the plot come alive. He writes so that you can easily create his world in your mind and what a trip it is. Be advised that for all of his beautiful writing, Blake is also graphic. Still, I have yet to put down a Blake novel before enjoying every morsel is read.

I found the book absolutely fascinating.

It started me scurrying round the internet to Lori Hyde's wonderful sites on John Dillinger and Pierpont. I got all the films on Dillinger. Read the FBI reports from Melvin Purvis which are now in the public domain and on the net. Read all the books available about the Dillinger gang. Particularly recommeneded is Ellen Poulsen's Don't Call us Molls - all about the women of the Dillinger gang.

There is a picture there of Mary Kinder (Pierpont's girlfriend) by Pierpont's open casket after he was executed.

I am a singer songwriter and I made the title track of my next album St Peter and John Dillinger. Because of course, as the other reviewers point out - its hard to imagine a world where the likes of Harry Pierpont could be integrated as a useful member of the community. That is fascinating. What a paradox that God should plant such anti social people amongst us to do us harm - and then take none of the blame on himself.

Harry is not untalented, good looking, personable - but in this book he is also a vicious man, uncontrollable and flawed beyond even the desire for redemption.

I'm not sure it is totally accurate. When you read the actual histories of the Dillinger gang - most of them are fairly hapless and more than a bit pathetic. They spent much of their ill gotten gains on decent dentistry - something far beyond the purse of working folk in those days. The women had low self esteem and figured that a gangster was the only sort of chap they were worthy of.

Pierpont himself was executed for shooting a sheriff, and whilst shooting him didn't do the sheriff much good, it was his panicking comrade Mackley who killed the lawman by coshing him afterwards.

One time I taught in an inner city school and some of the kids were involved in a robbery where an old shop keeper got killed. It was evil enough what they did, but the real problem was that the kids were too dim to realise the consequences of their actions. I'm willing to bet the real Harry Pierpont was like that, rather than the Faustian character in Blakes excellent book.

This book is great entertainment though - great fun!!!

What a writer!

I'm sorry but I just couldn't even finish the book. It reminds me of erotica I used to write when I was a teenager. The story isn't compelling, the characters are transparent and everything is highly boring. And I'm not a prude. I love sex drugs and rock and roll...and bank robbers make for a great story. But this isn't one of them.

For a long time friends of mine recommended books by James Carlos Blake, but this is the first book by him that I got around to reading. It was well written, in a straightforward and fast paced style. I was somewhat disturbed by the content of the book. It was not the fact that it contained a great deal of explicit sex and violence, as such, that bothered me (although potential readers should be aware that it does contain quite graphic passages). The narrator of the book is "Handsome Harry" Pierpoint, a member of the John Dillinger bank robbery gang of the Depression era. The book does a very good job of capturing the attitudes and way of thinking and behaving of a violent sociopath who cares for nothing except his own immediate gratification. (One minor flaw: would half-educated high school dropouts really know enough to make jokes about Socrates and Oedipus?) The realistic depiction of the mind of a criminal is what bothered me about the book. Once I started reading it, I went right through it and I enjoyed reading it. But afterwards, it left me with a bad feeling. Was reading the thoughts of an essentially two-bit criminal worth two hours of my life and ten dollars of my money? I don't know. It is this doubt that leads me to give the book four stars instead of five. I hope that the author uses his excellent writing ability on a more worthy subject.

Mr. Blake has brought to life the "Forgotten Bank Robber". This novel is fiction but is probably as close to reality as the story of Harry Pierpont, could be told. The auhtor's research is commendable, especially, with so little available historical data to draw from. Mr. Blake has literally re-created Harry Pierpont into a very interesting and readable story. Harry Pierpont would be proud of this novel!

Whereas I enjoyed this book at the beach in a 3 day read --its pretty light stuff. Having read Handsome Harry I would recommend skipping this one and read a book based on fact instead. This as pure fiction lacks a certain creativity and leaves you thinking okay story okay action but simply okay. It uses many of the devices and story line that are present in Handsome Harry --but then Handsome Harry is a fictionalized account of an actual person and events.

"A World of Thieves" follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928.

The novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better than to join uncles Buck and Russell robbing banks. He doesn't, though, and quickly ends up in Angola Prison Farm, a notorious penitentiary bordered by the Mississippi River that's guarded almost entirely by inmates. Sonny accidentally killed a cop in a Baton Rouge jail brawl -- the son of "John Bones," the state's most feared lawman. Bones does not take the news well.

The 296-page novel details LaSalle's extrication from prison and a subsequent crime spree across the two states as Bones relentlessly hunts him down. Blake's criminals are unapolegetic about their livelihood, making the jump from card sharps to con men to armed robbers to bank robbers. Sonny's uncles believe he's foolish for not using his education to better himself.

"'We figured you'd end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that.'

"I wasn't sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.

"'World's full of thieves,' Buck said, 'but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind.'"

That's about as introspective as the book gets. Blake emphasizes carnage over character, leaving me dubious at one point about an act the LaSalles commit without hesitation or remorse. I didn't think they had it in them. They're in crime for money and thrills, killing only in the act of escaping jobs gone bad (another reviewer charitably describes this as "unintentional murder"). The whole novel's bloody and oversexed, with one particularly cringe-inducing crime of passion that leaves Buck nicknaming a part of his anatomy "Mr. Stump."

I loved the period details in the book: grimy hellish Texas boomtowns, Pierce-Arrow roadsters and Gladstone bags, revolvers, guns and pistols of wide make and utility. As a Texas native, I've been to several of the places in the book back when they still had a little frontier left in them. Blake covers the territory well.

"A World of Thieves" is crisply told, perhaps too spare in detail when it comes to the heads of its protagonists. I didn't see the ending coming -- a single-paragraph chapter that hits at the speed of a bullet.

It is cliche but A WORLD OF THIEVES is not James Carlos Blake's best work. The writing style seems flat or maybe controlled, not full of the vibrancy and literary energy of RED GRASS RIVER or IN ROGUE BLOOD. My best guess is that Mr. Blake decided to write a more subdued tale, a little quieter, more subtle than the others and it came out less passionate. A WORLD didn't win any book awards where both RED GRASS and IN ROGUE did, a fact which helps makes my point. But all this is only comparing Blake to Blake and Blake is the best. A WORLD OF THIEVES is still full of action and adventure and it brings to life the 1920's in Texas and Louisiana. You have roadsters and oil wells and speakeasys and boom towns and New Orleans and West Texas. The action includes fisticuffs (our hero is a champion boxer), prison escapes, gun battles and holdups. A particularly sinister villain adds menace to the tale. And there is a love story and a boy-coming-of-age story here as well. Plenty for the Blake fan. Not his best but still pretty good. I give it three and a half shotgun shells out of five.

It is cliche but A WORLD OF THIEVES is not James Carlos Blake's best work. The writing style seems flat or maybe controlled, not full of the vibrancy and literary energy of RED GRASS RIVER or IN ROGUE BLOOD. My best guess is that Mr. Blake decided to write a more subdued tale, a little quieter, more subtle than the others and it came out less passionate. A WORLD didn't win any book awards where both RED GRASS and IN ROGUE did, a fact which helps makes my point. But all this is only comparing Blake to Blake and Blake is the best. A WORLD OF THIEVES is still full of action and adventure and it brings to life the 1920's in Texas and Louisiana. You have roadsters and oil wells and speakeasys and boom towns and New Orleans and West Texas. The action includes fisticuffs (our hero is a champion boxer), prison escapes, gun battles and holdups. A particularly sinister villain adds menace to the tale. And there is a love story and a boy-coming-of-age story here as well. Plenty for the Blake fan. Not his best but still pretty good. I give it three and a half shotgun shells out of five.

I'm a big James Carlos Blake fan and it is painful to have to give A World of Thieves a mixed review. If this book had been written by another author and I had not read Red Grass River, I certainly would be singing the praises of this book. However, I know that Blake can do much better and really all he has done with this book is rewrite Red Grass River, moving the setting from the Everglades to Angola Prison in Louisianna and West Texas.

If you are new to Blake, do yourself a favor and read Red Grass River or In the Rogue Blood and wait until this one comes out in paperback. I think Blake does a tremendous job in recreating the underbelly of past American eras. His characters tend to be people living on the edge, pushed to violence by the forces of society. Rugged individualists. People who will kill savagely without missing a beat. But also people who have a tender heart towards their families and even complete strangers. One minute the protagonist is holding up a mom and pop grocery--the next he is helping an old man change a tire along the side of a hot dusty Texas highway.

There are no easy answers or platitudes in Blake's books. Violence usually begets violence. And if you need happy, conventional endings, look elsewhere. But if you like to turn over a rock and see what's crawling underneath, then I can highly recommend Blake's work.

It was alright. At first you might not catch on cause of all the spanish, but it will be well worth the read once you get further along in the book.

It was kind of short. Page numbers had nothing to do with it, it was just that the story seemed kind of short. I gave this mexican 3 stars.

Is it merely coincidence that the anti-heroes in James Carlos Blake's ultra-violent passion plays are constantly crossing state lines, fences, deserts and rivers to reach their fates?

Don't count on it. Mankind's greatest stories from Homer to Hemingway have required their heroes to cross perilous thresholds, from their safe, familiar worlds into a place that would challenge their bodies, hearts and minds. To fail is to die; to succeed is to change irreversibly.

And blood is almost always spilled. Blake has merely elevated bloodshed to a fine art.

Blake's newest contribution to historical crime fiction is "Under the Skin," a borderland noir about love and crime in Depression-era coastal Texas and northern Mexico. But the real borders it crosses are not just geographic.

The bulk of the story is set in gritty and bohemian Galveston in the first few days of 1936, but it really begins 22 years earlier, when Pancho Villa and his most bloodthirsty captain visit an El Paso whorehouse and plant the seed of destiny.

Blake was born in Mexico and raised in Texas, and is among the brightest stars in historical fiction, particularly where bad men make good stories. All his books have been set in the turbulent times between the dawn of Manifest Destiny and the Depression, wherever humans could inflict the most inhumanity on each other.

"Under the Skin" is brutal and beautiful. Blake's savage crime saga isn't driven only by the body count nor its cold-blooded cruelty. What makes this book -- and Blake's others -- truly horrific are passages of pure poetry and the haunting beauty of Blake's writing.

Few writers can skillfully blend the poetic and the perverse, as if the esoteric and animalistic sides of the brain shared an impermeable border. But as Blake has shown, borders are made to be crossed: John Gregory Dunne ("True Confessions") and James Ellroy ("My Dark Places") are among the most seasoned travelers to cross that particular boundary, but Blake lives there.

His unflinching prose drives stake through fainter hearts, but Blake explores dark borderlands of the human spirit. He has rightfully been hailed as one of the most original writers in America today, and is certainly one of the bravest. "Under the Skin" and his other previous stories all have the seductive fascination of a beautiful song scrawled in blood.

This novel is the story of James Rudolph Youngblood, but you'll call him Jimmy Youngblood and drop the Rudolph if you know what's good for you! His father was Rodolfo Fierro, a Mexican revolutionary who ran with Pancho Villa during the decade long Mexican Revolution. Fierro was Villa's chief executionar and one day he killed 300 enemy prisoners in about 3 hours with a gatling gun. After that he crossed the border into Texas and visited a whorehouse for some much needed relaxation. He chooses a blue eyed, fair skinned prositute for the night and although neither of them can speak the other's language an undeniable and powerful connection is formed between them based soley on mutaual, instinctual, sexual desire. For reasons she does not herself understand the white prostitute, Ava, removes her contraception device during their night of sexual play and becomes pregant with Fierro's child. Fierro himslef of course left before before day break and goes back to fight the Mexican revolution and die his inevitably violent death, never knowing about his bastard son by an anglo whore. Ava, the white protstitute, decides that she wants to keep her child and agrees to marry a customer of hers, Cullen Youngblood, who keeps pestering her with the offer of marriage. At first she kept refusing but once she learns of her pregant condition she accepts Cullen Youngblood's offer on condition that she be allowed to keep the child even though it is not Cullen's. She even tells him that the child is probably Mexican. At first he is upset but decides to marry her anyway. Thus in such bizzare and unlikely cirumstances is Jimmy Youngblood brought into the world. Of course Ava does not tell anyone who Jimmy's father really is even though she secretly takes pride in the fact that her boy's father was such a notirious killer of men. Jimmy knows nothing of his mother's past as a whore and he does not even know she is his mother, he thinks his mother died giving birth to him and that Ava is his aunt. Jimmy has the brown skin of a Mexican but the blue eyes of an anglo. He grows up on Cullen Youngblood's ranch with his half brother Reuben. His life is uneventful except for the fact that he is so good at shooting it is scary. Eventually he runs into trouble with the law and is forced to run away from home and make his own way in the world. He ends up working for an Italian gangster named Rose Maceo who runs all organized crime, gambling, prositution, bootlegging, etc. in Galvaston County, Texas. The novel mostly takes place in 1936. Jimmy is the chief enforcer for Rose Maceo, he is the number 1 assassin for the organization. Jimmy is always beating, crippling, or killing someone but it is always someone who deserves it. His life changes when he encounters a beautiful young Mexican girl, Daniella, who herself is on the run from a rich but evil Mexican hacienda owner. This Mexican hacienda owner, Ceaser Cavalres, kidnapped Daniella from Texas and married her in Mexico on his extensive estate. At first she was awed by his wealth and agreed to marry him but she soon realizes that she is nothing but a prisoner in a gilded cage. She escapes to America and comes to Galveston and meets Jimmy Youngblood. Meanwhile, Ceaser Cvaleres has sent his henchmen after her in order to kidnap her and bring her back to him. It does not take a genius to figure out what happens next, let the mayhem and killing begin! Some nice plot twists for Ceaser Cavalres has a connection with Jimmy Youngblood's past even a experienced and savy reader wont see coming. Lots of moral ambiguity as their is no "good guy" in this novel. Even the "bad guy" Ceaser Cavleres has his sympathic momements. See Rodolfo Fierro, Jimmy's father, might have been a genuine revolutionary fighting for the poor and opressed in a fascist society but he was also a bloodthirsty convict who enjoyed mass murder. Ceaser Cavleres might be a tyranical, elitist land owner who makes his profits off of the hard labor of the peon but even he has feelings and needs. Jimmy himself is sympathic yet he is also somewhat evil as he kills and maims people on a reguar basis. His father may have been a revolutionary but he certainly is not for he works for a pure capitalist gangster. At the same time he is not as blood thirsty as his father. Complex and belivible characters make their choices in a world not sharply contrasted in black and white but like real life is a muddle of different tones of gray. This is no sappy love story, someone dies every 10 pages or so. Not Blake's best but far from his worst.

This novel by James Carlos Blake reminds me of Elmore Leonard but tougher, maybe a little darker. Set in Texas and Mexico, it is a crime novel with the flavor of a later-day western. Since Pancho Villa appears briefly in the story it can be considered an historical western, but why quibble? On the back of the hardback, there is a quote from The Washingston Post about another of Mr. Blake's books but speaking of his work in general. "He knows in his bones," the Post reviewer declares of Mr. Blake, "that violence is at the heart of American history." Huh? Did this reviewer skip World History 101? The bloody tapestry of European history, woven with pogroms, inquisitions, psychotic rulers, incessant religious wars and ethnic cleansing, makes American history look like a Manhattan cocktail party. What we are talking about here is conflict. A novel without conflict is hardly a novel at all. Conflict resolution is at the heart of any story. Mr. Blake has chosen the crime genre for his current subject and the resolution of conflict among gangsters is -- yep, you guessed it --often violent. If you like Elmore Leonard, you will enjoy "Under The Skin".

While entertaining, I found this book too similar in plot to "A World Of Thieves", Blake's last novel. Both books, moreover, are substantially shorter than most of Blake's prior outstanding works. I hope this does not mean that we can look forward to Blake cranking out short, mediocre,and formulaic books in the future in order to cash in on his reader's loyalty (ala Larry McMurtry). Nevertheless, if you like Blake (and there is very much to like) you will undoubtedly enjoy this book.

Some of you might know Williams for his "Red Wheelbarrow" poem. Others of you might know his poem "Paterson", an epic about the New Jersey city. Even if you don't know Williams' work, this is necessary reading, as "I Wanted..." showcases an artist at the tail end of his career documenting his artistic evolution by commenting on everything he has ever published.

And indeed, there is much to document. But despite his prolificness -- rarely did a year go by without Williams producing a volume -- Williams was not a figure in the popular consciousness for the first few decades of his career. Time and again through the book, he comments on his lack of exposure, his small print runs, and his feeling of laboring in the shadows of TS Eliot and his acolytes. Perhaps due to not having the classical grounding of Eliot and Pound, Williams worked within his own "limitations" to forge a conversational style that takes the Whitman legacy and builds on it.

I recommend this book to those of you who want to write serious work, or to simply understand the lifetime's apprenticeship that goes into serious work being created. Not surprisingly, by the way, I recovered this volume from a library discard pile, which only goes to show one more example of a society too willing to discard quiet works of grace for corporate billboards in the detention halls that double as public schools.

When he was 73 years old, William Carlos Williams held a series of "informal conversations" with a university student working on her degree. She sorted the transcripts chronologically according to the works to which they refer and compiled them in this small volume. The result is a collection of trivia, charming chatter and gossip related to the poems, stories, plays and novels written by Williams between 1909 and 1957.

The subtitle of the book is quite misleading, though. An autobiography (at least in my opinion) tries to impose a certain order or direction or "meaning" on a life. This book never tries to do any such thing for the poems or the other works. Williams does not say much about how he wrote his poems or what their "meaning" should be or in which context they stand. That was rather disappointing. But then again, I should not have expected Williams to be an interpreter of his poems in the first place. As a writer he is pragmatic and straightforward, not inclined to introspection, speculation or interpretation.

Williams seems to work by instinct, and this method works fine for him. In one interesting example in the book, used by Williams to illustrate a point, he deletes just one line from a nine-line poem - and it is an amazing improvement. His explanation for the deletion, however, is typically bland and uninformative: "See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better is looks?"

What the book conveys quite successfully it Williams's unpretentious way of communicating, his often self-deprecating humor and the ease and pleasure with which he looks back over his almost 50 years of writing. Williams has a mischievous streak in him, too. He enjoys risking a small scandal by putting on the record his thoughts at a poetry reading in Wellesley where the college girls "stood on their heels and yelled ... the girls ... my god I was breathless, but I said do you really want more and they said yes so I read what Floss [his wife] knew they would like. They were so adorable. I could have raped them all!"

"I Wanted to Write a Poem" is definitely not a must-have book. I have picked out some (but not all) of the raisins I have found in a book that was, overall, quite plain and trite. And it left me with a feeling that the 73-year old Williams is simply a nice, elder gentleman with a sense of humor, a bit of unobtrusive posturing and an easygoing, mostly sanguine temperament. At a certain point in time he must have reached that desirable and pleasant state in which he decided to take himself not too serious anymore. My favorite quote in this context comes from his wife: "Psychiatry? He used to say, 'I'm nuts and everybody knows it,' and let it go at that."

Some of you might know Williams for his "Red Wheelbarrow" poem. Others of you might know his poem "Paterson", an epic about the New Jersey city. Even if you don't know Williams' work, this is necessary reading, as "I Wanted..." showcases an artist at the tail end of his career documenting his artistic evolution by commenting on everything he has ever published.

And indeed, there is much to document. But despite his prolificness -- rarely did a year go by without Williams producing a volume -- Williams was not a figure in the popular consciousness for the first few decades of his career. Time and again through the book, he comments on his lack of exposure, his small print runs, and his feeling of laboring in the shadows of TS Eliot and his acolytes. Perhaps due to not having the classical grounding of Eliot and Pound, Williams worked within his own "limitations" to forge a conversational style that takes the Whitman legacy and builds on it.

I recommend this book to those of you who want to write serious work, or to simply understand the lifetime's apprenticeship that goes into serious work being created. Not surprisingly, by the way, I recovered this volume from a library discard pile, which only goes to show one more example of a society too willing to discard quiet works of grace for corporate billboards in the detention halls that double as public schools.

When he was 73 years old, William Carlos Williams held a series of "informal conversations" with a university student working on her degree. She sorted the transcripts chronologically according to the works to which they refer and compiled them in this small volume. The result is a collection of trivia, charming chatter and gossip related to the poems, stories, plays and novels written by Williams between 1909 and 1957.

The subtitle of the book is quite misleading, though. An autobiography (at least in my opinion) tries to impose a certain order or direction or "meaning" on a life. This book never tries to do any such thing for the poems or the other works. Williams does not say much about how he wrote his poems or what their "meaning" should be or in which context they stand. That was rather disappointing. But then again, I should not have expected Williams to be an interpreter of his poems in the first place. As a writer he is pragmatic and straightforward, not inclined to introspection, speculation or interpretation.

Williams seems to work by instinct, and this method works fine for him. In one interesting example in the book, used by Williams to illustrate a point, he deletes just one line from a nine-line poem - and it is an amazing improvement. His explanation for the deletion, however, is typically bland and uninformative: "See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better is looks?"

What the book conveys quite successfully it Williams's unpretentious way of communicating, his often self-deprecating humor and the ease and pleasure with which he looks back over his almost 50 years of writing. Williams has a mischievous streak in him, too. He enjoys risking a small scandal by putting on the record his thoughts at a poetry reading in Wellesley where the college girls "stood on their heels and yelled ... the girls ... my god I was breathless, but I said do you really want more and they said yes so I read what Floss [his wife] knew they would like. They were so adorable. I could have raped them all!"

"I Wanted to Write a Poem" is definitely not a must-have book. I have picked out some (but not all) of the raisins I have found in a book that was, overall, quite plain and trite. And it left me with a feeling that the 73-year old Williams is simply a nice, elder gentleman with a sense of humor, a bit of unobtrusive posturing and an easygoing, mostly sanguine temperament. At a certain point in time he must have reached that desirable and pleasant state in which he decided to take himself not too serious anymore. My favorite quote in this context comes from his wife: "Psychiatry? He used to say, 'I'm nuts and everybody knows it,' and let it go at that."

I am from Kentucky but now live in North Carolina. A relative traced my family tree back two generations, but no farther. Although I had no burning interest in genealogy per se, I wondered what eastern state my relatives came from. On 1 January 2008, an aunt sent me a package with lineage traced back to Adoniram Allen b.1734. I traced Adoniram back to England 1636, so in one fell swoop I now have part of my traced lineage. I enjoyed the Kozee book, because I am also descended from two Baker lines. Robert Baker, in whose house the first Clay County court was held, is also my ancestor. I enjoyed reading about the early history of Kentucky. Another relative is Kenus Fara Daniel, but I have not traced his parents, grandparents. Perhaps the Thomas W Daniel noted in the Clay County section will help me make future connections.

The vital records collected and available in this book are very useful but the genealogy of the families is quite flawed. A researcher would want to verify each bit of information. My own families (Browns, Prestons, Van Hooses, Williams, etc) are in this book and the mistakes are numerous.