SOURCE: A review of Poems, 1963–1983, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, p. 685.

In the following review of Poems, 1963–1983, Leddy comments that he finds Williams's later poetry in With Ignorance and Tar richer than that of his earliest volumes.

Poems, 1963–1983 collects C. K. Williams's first four volumes of poetry—Lies (1969), I Am the Bitter Name (1972), With Ignorance (1977), and Tar (1983)—along with The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling (1983), translations of the Japanese poet Issa. The four volumes reveal a marked development, as Williams moves from the ominous abstractions and assured invective of his earlier poems to more concrete, less certain considerations of particular human conditions.

The earlier poems of Lies and I Am the Bitter Name do not wear well; too often they are made of extremes of emotion and diction whose causes remain unclear; they abound in disjunctive syntax and images of scabs, scars, tumors, and genitalia that...