LG WILLIAMS isn’t just about poetry. His success tells us as much about ourselves (and our desire to create beautiful, serene worlds to live by and share) as about his imaginative skills. LG’s lyrics aren’t as much about word and image as they are about style and presentation. The voice is often simple (that’s good, because it means less work for the reader), and beautifully crafted. You may find some of it a bit beyond your time or taste, but it’s fun to look at the beautiful lines and dream.
In any case, LG’s latest book, Killer Beings, should be proudly displayed on your living room table – right next to your latest issue of Martha Stewart Living. It has a complete assortment of goodies, for nearly any occasion. You will find old friends and new ideas, like the wonderful poems of love and longing, which help one get through the stressful workdays or family holidays.
You will want to read some of these things right away. For instance, did it ever occur to you to notice the crudités and dip at every party, or to ask yourself why the veggies are sometimes placed in individual vertical containers (glasses, vases, silver servers, etc.), rather than laid out on a flat tray? Don’t they look fresh and wonderful? On the other hand, you may find some of the poetry a little difficult, impossibly complicated, or just plain silly. There are so many poems to choose from, you can just skip over the ones that don’t suit your style and pick from dozens of others.
This is a good opportunity to point you to the entire LG Williams oeuvre: it is so big! A few of you may have met LG in his pre-poetic phase, when he was a freshmen applying to Yale University. He was not reading or writing too much then. But he has been busy writing books ever since. Most of us have been buying and enjoying his books since they first appeared. As I’ve said, they’re more about the style and presentation of the word than about complicated images and complex ideas (although they are that occasionally.) I’ve found them to be easy to introduce at neighborhood book clubs and excellent to browse through. A warning: these new poems (like those in his earlier The City of Angels Has A Halo of Smog) may seem a bit sparse; so try to read them with a side dish of caviar or fine glass of wine.
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