SOURCE: “House Guests,” in New Statesman & Society, December 4, 1992, pp. 39–40.

In the following excerpt, Herd offers a favorable assessment of A Dream of Mind.

At one point in the title poem of C. K. Williams’ A Dream of Mind, the poet's rigorous speculations carry him to the edge of Ashbery's world. “How even tell who I am now, how know if I'll ever be more than the field of these interchangings?” Here, however, the comparison ends, as Williams draws back from the conclusion Ashbery so gladly entertains.

A Dream of Mind is written in the long, double pentameter line Williams has used exclusively since the mid-1970s. This form, which owes more to late 18th-century blank verse than to Whitman, is the site for sharply different kinds of poems. The first is an unflinching description of the brutalities of urban America.

For instance, “Harm,” in which a vagrant defecates...