Miller Williams was the reason I went to Arkansas, and he sat on my thesis committee as well, so I’m glad to see him get a little love from the NY Times for his latest book.
His latest collection, “Time and the Tilting Earth,” offers many pleasures. Chief among these are Williams’s way of entwining the pure earthiness of language as it’s spoken with rigorous metrical precision, and, analogously, his affection for the quotidian, with an insistence on confronting unanswerable but unavoidable existential problems. In poem after poem, he mingles the low and the high in both form and content, bringing a sense of cleareyed practicality to life’s big questions and a keenly honed poetic technique to the cadences of Arkansas porch talk.
Glad to see that he’s still plugging away after all these years.
Another Poem to Love 