This National Book Award winning volume by a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who taught at Princeton and died in 2015, is a moving example of how poetry continues to be “the best words put in the best order” (Coleridge) exploring the human condition in a way that novels, short stories, essays, and other arts cannot approach.  Williams, who was 67 when he wrote these poems combines the pain of a raw and exposed abrasion with the deep insight of one who has loved and lost to produce poems about life, death, love, loss, and man’s nature.  His love of nature and the goodness of the earth in contrast to the warring nature of man is summarized in The World:  …reality has put itself so solidly/before me/there’s little need for mystery…Except for us, for how we taken the/world/to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.” A wonderful poem Here is one section of a fourteen part poem Of Childhood the Dark:  Uncanny to realize one was here, so much/came before the awareness of being here./Then to suspect your place here was yours only/because no one else wanted or would have it./A site, a setting, and you the matter to fill it,/though you guessed it could never be filled./Therefore, as much as a presence, you were a problem,/a task; insoluble, so optional, so illicit./Then the first understanding: that you/yourself were the difficult thing to be done.”  From War, written after 9/11:  These things that happen in the particle of time we have to be alive.”  The poem, The Clause warrants a complete quotation here, but is too long.  Suffice it to say that it is a superb consideration of our mind, self, and soul that together ‘might finally solve the quandary/of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;”.  Williams is clearly one of our generation’s great poets.