This is the eighth book - and the most various yet - from a major American poet. 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 of our own.

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