Pulitzer Prize winner C.K. Williams, who died in 2015, left a final collection of poems, one that grapples with the process of dying, slowly and with full awareness, and attempts to apply logic to it. Falling Ill: Last Poems is filled with the non sequiturs of the body, the wisdom of age combined with physical failings, the acknowledgement of a breaking down while being powerless to stop it. For example, in "How Many": "How many times do I find myself/ whispering later even as I have to grasp/ death's advent will have to bring sooner."
The poems--all of them five stanzas of three lines each--are filled with unpunctuated questions and struggle with nuances in the language of death--"next," "gone," "life." There's a candid recognition of the body here, a refusal to sugarcoat. One poem states, "Here's my face slung on its bones like a slop/ of concrete here the eyes punched into the mortar." The poems are quietly philosophical, resonant with repetition: "consumed as cicadas in myths are consumed/ by their singing and what is it in me that's/ being consumed and what would consumed mean." Falling Ill paints a melancholy portrait of a man expecting death, meditating on mortality and wondering how life happens even as it comes to a close. The verses ask what crying is for, meditate on what an embrace feels like, marvel at the increasing difficulty of walking and know that "my future tense is dissolving even as I watch." --Richael Best, bookseller, the Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, Wash.