Overview

This collection spans political outcry, Martian speculation, Texas landscapes, aging, grief, and exuberant love for grandchildren, music, animals, and language. Using traditional forms, it links personal memory and family tenderness with tyranny, war, technology, and death, asking what beauty, truth, and courage can still mean. Later sequences play with bugs and birds in witty monologues, and with Anglo‑Saxon–style riddles that personify forces like water, speech, time, and death as double-edged presences in human life. The long poem ""Zebulon"" reimagines explorer Zebulon Pike, probing flawed heroism, misreading, and the obsessive lure of sources and summits. The volume closes with formal translations and adaptations of German Romantic poets, extending its concerns with love, suffering, reconciliation, fate, and the power and danger of words themselves.

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9781965766835

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Reviews

""Donald Mace Williams exhibits remarkable creativity in this collection of poems, published in his mid-nineties. His poems utilize meter and rhyme with ease, engaging with his own memories, recent news stories, and elements of his personal life, including the birthdays of his granddaughters. His tone is frequently conversational and always engaging. Some highlights include his poems about classical music. This is a collection that will stay with the reader, to use the poet's own words, 'Like images of light on closed eyelids / Or French-horn resonances living on / In polished walls after a concert ends.'"" — Amit Majmudar, author of Things My Grandmother Said: Poems

Author Information

Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. His poems have appeared in five dozen magazines. Wolfe, his epic adaptation of Beowulf, set in the Old West, was released, along with his prose memoir, in Wolfe and Being Ninety. His poetry has also been collected in The Nectar Dancer and his translation of selected poems by Rainer Maria Rilke were released in 2025's Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader. Williams is ninety-six and still writing. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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