Low Sweet Notes, Robert Carl Williams, 2002

Williams, an architect, world class sailor, and poet, who died earlier this year lived in Vermont and was a friend of Elvin Kaplan who loaned me this slim volume of beautiful verse.  Writing about family and his childhood in the Tennessee mountains, his long and happy marriage, his love of nature, and his musings about the survival of the spirit after death, Williams hits some beautiful phrases and metaphors:  “as time bleeds through him lucent/like sun through veins of leaves’; ‘having to leave their life behind/in a world that would forget they came’; ‘Now in another August/sieved through the cloth of years to clarify”.  These are lovely poems about parts of the world known and unknown.