Review by Booklist

Ray Olson

Declines, losses, and defeats are much on Williams' mind, and he adjusts to them pretty well, thanks in no small measure, it often seems, to his fluency with formal verse.

The demands of form and the pleasure of making rhyme and meter elegantly float a natural -sounding, accessible diction constitute a kind of assuagement for the heartsadness of Williams' poems about tragedy in America's heartland, aging fathers, departed lovers, and surviving children who died in infancy. There is balm, too, in the procession of the seasons, and Williams is capable of passages about those age-old changes that are as indelibly correct as anything in Frost or even Wordsworth:

"Here spring begins its slow, corrosive work:
A single drip, another, then a third
Drill cigarette bums in the snow."

Religion, too, affords its solace, as in "The Doomsayers Awake following the Predicted Apocalypse," about a morning whose glories "bespeak a love too eager to forgive." In Williams' work, precise imagery unites with humanity of feeling to become poetry of everlasting refreshment.

Booklist