{"product_id":"living-on-the-surface","title":"Living on the Surface","description":"Federico García Lorca did not know Miller Williams, of course, but he was describing him when he told us that a poet is \"\"professor of the five senses.\"\" The poems in this collection cover thirty years of loving contact with the endlessly varied surfaces of the world. They are poems in which the common furniture of our lives is always present, in which the universal resides in the local, in which elegance is born of clarity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe have enough to fret about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Almost all of us concur,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e we'll live with the holidays we have\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e and the grace of God as if it were.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (\"\"He Speaks to His Arguing Friends and to Himself\"\")\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe poems are moments from human lives turned into art, but never removed from where they were found.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGrass grows out of every sidewalk crack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Briars have taken the garden.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The arteries of the old dog harden almost audibly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The basement door is broken and the mice are back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (\"\"A Summer Afternoon An Old Man Gives Some Thought to the Central Questions\"\")\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs John Ciardi wrote of Williams and his work, \"\"Taken beginning to end, as both the word and the fact go, these are remarkable poems for, among other things, the deceptively plain straightforwardness of them. Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable, doing this, is how perilously close he plays to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.","brand":"Louisiana State University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55807329829208,"sku":"9780807115749","price":22.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780807115749_81e1f9be-9bb9-4e20-b04e-81757424082e.jpg?v=1778679028","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/living-on-the-surface","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}