Böcker av Donald Mace Williams

These sixty-one poems, only a few of which are longer than a page, have the clarity and terseness that newspaper reporters strive for. No wonder-Donald Mace Williams spent most of his long adulthood as a newspaper writer and editor. They are his observations, full of joy and sadness, about life, loss, and nature.Williams spent more than seventy years as a devoted student and amateur singer of German Lieder by Schubert and other great composers. That concentration may account in part for the metrical flow, the frequent rhymes, and the beginning-middle-and end structure of most of his poems.Williams, now in his nineties, has always been a traditionalist in his literary and musical tastes. Meter and rhyme may be unfashionable today, but to Williams they remain, like him, alive and well.

When a strange, beguiling creature is found to have slaughtered first the cattle of a lonely ranch in the late nineteenth-century Texas, then one of its laborers, the fate of the locals is placed in the hands of an out-of-towner, a calm and confident young man by the name of Billy Wolfe. In this epic adaptation of Beowulf, Donald Mace Williams recasts the epic poem, setting it in the Old West and turning it into a critique of man's encroachment on nature.In Being Ninety, Williams recounts his more than nine decades as a child of the Depression, a poet, journalist, professor, classically trained singer, husband of 62 years, father, and lifelong wanderer. Williams's life reads like a picaresque novel of Texas and many points farther afield. He forges on through his nineties on the strengths of his love of the prairies and his memories of his loving wife, Nell, and ultimately of his devotion to the writing life.