SOURCE: “The World's Violences,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 3, 1997, p. 25.

In the following review, McKendrick commends Williams's intensity and empathy in The Vigil, but finds shortcomings in his tendency to allegorize and to employ dubious shifts of perspective in this volume.

The long lines and short poems of the American poet C. K. Williams's Flesh and Blood (1988) combined the leisure of a flâneur with the urgency of a frontline reporter. His next book, A Dream of Mind (1992), although it contained some poems of the same extraordinary quality, turned inwards (at least in the long title sequence), quarrying the psyche, and was rewarded by grim, unwieldy slabs of abstraction. The Vigil is somewhere between the two.

Here, too, as in both preceding books, there is a poem about a vagrant which attends unflinchingly to infirmity and terminal squalor. In this latest example, “Thirst,” it is Williams's perceptions, from...