Ron Peters's Reviews > Selected Poems

I’ve said I’m not a poetry guy. But in my mid-to-late teens, I was into modernists and imagists and some of those poems still rattle around in my head. So, it’s fun to pick that stuff up once every quarter century or two to see what I think now.

Three hundred pages of it! I had my doubts, but Wiliams is an easy read. Quite a lot of it did nothing for me. Some I found just bad, see “A Woman in Front of a Bank.” Unsurprisingly, occasionally, he sounds like Pound or Eliot. I mostly enjoyed the stuff from the nineteen twenties. His early poems are too derivative of Whitman and his later stuff keeps getting longer, which doesn’t work for me. Or I just didn’t like them. I did, however, enjoy “Pictures from Bruegel” (1962). Some of the ones I still enjoy included (Wow! They’re all about aging and death!):

“Dedication for a Plot of Ground” (http://tinyurl.com/txenf44t),
“To Waken an Old Lady” (http://tinyurl.com/38yp495d),
“Death” (http://tinyurl.com/ywypzrr3), and
“The Last Words of My English Grandmother” (http://tinyurl.com/5dfum785)

But my favorite Williams is still “This is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Tena said, “So? He ate some plums, and he liked them.” I s’pose.