The Pattern More Complicated

New and Selected Poems

By: Alan Williamson

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Hardcover | 16 October 2004 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
264 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.5 x 1.3 x 0.15

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Alan Williamson artfully joins social and literary history with personal experience in "The Pattern More Complicated," a collection of his very best poems over the last twenty years. A powerful section of new poems draws the whole work together in a kind of autobiographical novel, as--in Eliot's phrase, from which the title is taken--"the pattern of dead and living" grows "more complicated" with the years. Williamson's verse is a refreshing examples of how delicately the personal can intersect with the public in a love for the considered life.
"The Pattern More Complicated" assembles Williamson's most important, representative poems, marking the trajectory of poetic development and the recurrence of themes across the span of four previous collections to present a survey of a major American poet in a single volume.

Industry Reviews

"A human and spiritual journey suffused with passion and wisdom, Alan Williamson's masterful lyrics in The Pattern More Complicated travel into the delicate territory of the psyche and the intricate world landscape, creating a stunning kaleidoscope of the lived life with its innumerable depths and edges-its despairs and its riches." -Susan Hahn
-- "Susan Hahn"

"He can compare a single life to an epoch of civilization....In doing what he does with so much emotion and learning, Williamson ranks as the first American poet capable of equaling the lyric authority of Rilke, who made a career out of the scrupulous transformation of his own breath-by-breath life into an aesthetic history of the world."

--William Harmon

"If there were such a school as maximalism in poetry, Alan Williamson would be on the board of directors. His poems aim at a high sublimity, and his aim is usually good. But though his ambitions are Orphic, his building materials are contemporary, the curriculum vitae of an American childhood that finds ineffable significances in industrial and suburban landscapes."

--Thomas Disch

"Williamson's genius, for all its refinement, is strikingly tough and even defiant."

--Richard Tillinghast

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Fallings from us, vanishings	p. 3
The city	p. 5
The chair	p. 8
Mr. Brown	p. 11
The muse of distance	p. 13
Small college : all male : early 1960s	p. 29
From an airplane	p. 31
The light's reading	p. 33
East Arlington	p. 36
Sandy	p. 38
Obsession	p. 41
The prayer of the Cathars	p. 42
Art Roman	p. 45
Recitation for the dismantling of a hydrogen bomb	p. 47
Epilogue	p. 53
Love and the soul	p. 61
Requited love	p. 64
Fragments : traveling in marriage	p. 76
Domestic architecture	p. 78
Wide-angle shot : return to Snowy River	p. 79
Deb's dream about Pavese	p. 80
Your forest-moonlight picture	p. 82
Toward the new year	p. 83
The ambivalent man	p. 85
Forest Street	p. 89
Rilke's argument with Don Giovanni	p. 91
The author reconsiders	p. 93
Unanticipated mirrors	p. 95
Enthusiasm	p. 99
Highway restaurant	p. 100
For my daughter, leaving	p. 102
Tidepools	p. 104
A childhood around 1950	p. 111
Dreams of sacrifice	p. 112
Paint it black	p. 115
Listening to Leonard Cohen	p. 118
After the election, 1984	p. 121
Speakers from the ice	p. 122
La Pastorela	p. 126
Mansard dreams	p. 131
Linda does my horoscope	p. 134
Puccini dying	p. 138
In Paradiso, speriamo bene	p. 140
Caitlin : a biography	p. 143
Dinosaurs	p. 145
After "Death of a porn queen" : traveling the Great Basin	p. 148
Red cloud	p. 149
Friends who have failed	p. 157
For Robinson Jeffers	p. 158
House-moving from Tournon to Besancon	p. 160
A progress of the soul	p. 165
For my grandfather	p. 168
Trois Gymnopedies	p. 169
If, on your first love's wedding day	p. 175
Dream without end	p. 176
Bernini's Proserpine	p. 183
Aubade, reconstructed in tranquility	p. 189
C., again	p. 190
Spring trains	p. 193
Customs of the Barbarians	p. 194
Last autumn in Charlottesville	p. 197
Heaven	p. 199
Childless couple	p. 201
Van Gogh's asylum	p. 203
Old toys come back	p. 205
Theory of evil	p. 209
Adultery	p. 211
The factory	p. 213
Where the hills come down like a lion's paw on summer	p. 214
The cure of longing	p. 216
Martin Sloan	p. 218
The fever of Brother Barnabas	p. 220
A place	p. 222
Letter to a dead poet	p. 223
At the Villa Serbelloni : 1998	p. 225
MLA notes (1988)	p. 227
MLA notes II (1998)	p. 229
The cost	p. 231
Moving back to Charlottesville	p. 232
Villanelle : for Anne	p. 233
Autumn reparations	p. 234
The pattern more complicated	p. 235
Fantasia on some sentences from Combray	p. 240
Primrose Hill	p. 242
Nostos	p. 244
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

The Pattern More Complicated

New and Selected Poems

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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