Stars Through the Clouds: The Collected Poetry of Donald T. Williams by Donald T. Williams

Stars Through the Clouds: The Collected Poetry of Donald T. Williams Reviews

• 
  Werner

  An ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church and a PhD., Donald T. Williams is a longtime Professor of English at Toccoa Falls College, an evangelical liberal arts institution in the Georgia mountains. Most of the two dozen books that he's written or contributed to are nonfiction works on literature, philosophy or theology. But he's also been writing poetry for decades (not all the poems here have associated dates, but one that does is dated May 6, 1972); this volume, published in 2011, brings together all of his poetic output over that span. In his short Introduction, he states that writing the verse in this collection, rather than all of his other work, is "...the main thing I was put on this planet to do.... If I have had anything significant to contribute, it is here." That would be a clue, if the reader needed one, that this is for the most part poetry which is very serious in its intention, and (while not "message-driven" in a reductive sense, as pure propaganda for a message, delivered without concern for aesthetics or human emotions), most of it is very definitely message-freighted. (And the messages being carried are profound.)
  
  Over 350 pages long, the body of the collection is broken down into five "Books." The first of these, "Times Around the Southern Appalachians," is sub-divided into five Parts and a number of the poems are Appalachian-themed (though others are not). "The Seed and Other Poems," references Scriptural themes and messages from the creation up into the New Testament epistles (the titular "Seed" is the "seed of Abraham"). Book Three, "Tales of Taliessen," includes poems with a medieval flavor, centering mostly around the Arthurian legend in its high-medieval incarnation, sometimes with Arthur's supposed minstrel Taliessen as a character or speaker. (Taliessen actually lived about a century after Arthur, but Williams is using poetic license.) This is followed by "A Labyrinth of Limericks and Clerestory of Clerehews: The Light Verse of Donald T. Williams." Finally, "Stars Through the Clouds," is on the surface more eclectic in subject matter, but its selections are bound together by the common theme of higher truth revealed to us in glimpses even in our earth-bound state (hence the image of the title). There are indications that some or all of these books may have been previously published individually (the first one has its own Prologue by the author, dated Fall 2009, and "Tales of Taliessen" is enhanced by a number of nicely done full-page black-and-white drawings by a Ruby Dunlap, a professor at Belmont Univ., but the other "Books" are not); but that isn't stated. Altogether, there are 363 poems (two of them are each repeated, with a slightly different title, in another "Book;" I counted each pair only once), plus one two-page selection, "The Chest of Iron," which is prose, and cast in the form of a dream vision rendered in deliberately medieval-sounding language (though in the second Book, not the third). Many of the poems are short, a number of them (such as the limericks) consisting of just a few lines; others are longer, often divided into parts, and several run for a number of pages (I think "The Seed," at 16 and 1/2 pages, is the longest)
  
  Much of this verse is explicitly religious, poetry of Christian worship and Christian testimony, and/or infused with a Christian or biblical message (several are explicitly related, in their titles, to particular Scripture texts by chapter and verse). But whether the Christian content is explicit or not, the author's faith forms the soil in which all of this poetry is grounded. The beauty of the natural, created world and universe (and its testimony to the Creator), the brevity of human life, the need for permanence and foundations in a world that's in flux, and the importance of the life of the mind and of the honest and serious quest for truth and the faith that it exists, are all important themes. So, too, is the importance of intuitively-felt knowledge (expressed, for instance, in the "song" of a river), and of history and heritage. Like James Russell Lowell, though he doesn't refer to him, Williams is very much concerned with truth, goodness and beauty, conceived of as real things, and sees the witness to these as the purpose of literary art. So, unlike many modern poets, his poetry is unabashedly didactic in intention, and seeks to be understood rather to be obscure.
  
  In a very real way, Williams' style is part of his message (and that connection is also explicit in places). All of his poetry is "formal," in the sense that it actually has distinctly poetic form, continuous with the great tradition of poetry in Western literature. Almost all of it rhymes; if it doesn't, it still has meter, in the form of "blank verse" or similar patterns, and ordered structure. Like his predecessors, he communicates sometimes obliquely, sometimes through symbol and metaphor; but he does communicate. Very rarely, I didn't grasp all of his meaning in a particular poem; but I never doubted that the meaning was present (even if I can't read the occasional Latin epigraph or understand the references in some places to musical terms or compositions, or to writers/books I haven't read), and on the whole this verse is highly accessible, and resonates very much with my own deepest beliefs and feelings. While I can appreciate free verse if it's well written (I like Sandburg, for instance --though Williams perhaps wouldn't), on the whole I tend to prefer the approach here, and I found many of these poems both beautiful and/or emotionally powerful.
  
  The three-page Preface by Williams' fellow Christian poet and scholar, Goodreads author James Prothero, makes the case for the major literary significance and quality of the poetry here. I made my own call on that point, rather than just following Prothero blindly; and having read the book, I would say it's a literary achievement of the first rank, on a par with the work of such poets as Donne and Tennyson. Even though I've read relatively little contemporary poetry, I can honestly say that this is the best contemporary poetry I've read --and I suspect that if I'd read dozens more collections, I'd still rank this one right up there!