SOURCE: A review of A Dream of Mind, in World Literature Today, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring, 1993, p. 387.

In the following review, Dick offers a positive assessment of A Dream of Mind, noting that the collection is an important work of poetry.

Using his familiar combination of long and short lines, C. K. Williams has arranged his latest collection so that it culminates in “Helen,” a summary poem in which are fused his main themes of death, dream, and memory. Death haunts A Dream of Mind, beginning with the very first poem, “When,” in which children help their terminally ill father end his life with dignity, and concluding with “Helen,” in which the speaker argues that to achieve union with the dead, the living must enter death themselves—not literally, but in a dream state where death is truly the mother of beauty, restoring the dead to the pure form...