Collected Poems brings together in one volume C. K. Williams's work of nearly forty years, enabling readers to follow the career of this great poet through its many phases and reinventions.

Here are his confrontational early poems, which bristle with a young idealist's righteous anger. Here are the roomy, rangy poems of Tar and With Ignorance, in which Williams married the long line of Whitman to a modern's psychological self-scrutiny; the compact sonnets of Flesh and Blood; and the inward investigations of A Dream of Mind. Here are the incomparable poems from the prize winning books Repair and The Singing. Here, too, are new poems, in which Williams's moral vigilance is brought to bear, again, on life during wartime. Collected Poems is the life's work of a modern master--fiercely intelligent, arresting in its beauty, unforgettable in its echoes and reverberations.