The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems(Phoenix Poets)

Alan Williamson artfully joins social and literary history with personal experience in The Pattern More Complicated, a collection of his very best poems over the last twenty years. A powerful section of new poems draws the whole work together in a kind of autobiographical novel, as—in Eliot's phrase, from which the title is taken—"the pattern of dead and living" grows "more complicated" with the years.  Williamson's verse is a refreshing examples of how delicately the personal can intersect with the public in a love for the considered life. The Pattern More Complicated assembles Williamson's most important, representative poems, marking the trajectory of poetic development and the recurrence of themes across the span of four previous collections to present a survey of a major American poet in a single volume.

About the Author :
Alan Williamson is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of four books of poems, most recently Love and the Soul and Res Publica, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review :
"Alan Williamson is a contemporary American master at illustrating the aura of place."--Robert Pinsky "The Washington Post" (3/13/2005 12:00:00 AM) "Williamson walks with Psyche, if Psyche were the Muse. . . . He has a sense for landscape, the Midwestern and Western states-foot-loose, car-loose-an underlying taste for large space or even emptiness. . . . A world we all know, but said better, with more gentle irony."--Gary Snyder "A human and spiritual journey suffused with passion and wisdom, Alan Williamson's masterful lyrics in The Pattern More Complicated travel into the delicate territory of the psyche and the intricate world landscape, creating a stunning kaleidoscope of the lived life with its innumerable depths and edges-its despairs and its riches." -Susan Hahn -- "Susan Hahn" "He can compare a single life to an epoch of civilization....In doing what he does with so much emotion and learning, Williamson ranks as the first American poet capable of equaling the lyric authority of Rilke, who made a career out of the scrupulous transformation of his own breath-by-breath life into an aesthetic history of the world." --William Harmon "If there were such a school as maximalism in poetry, Alan Williamson would be on the board of directors. His poems aim at a high sublimity, and his aim is usually good. But though his ambitions are Orphic, his building materials are contemporary, the curriculum vitae of an American childhood that finds ineffable significances in industrial and suburban landscapes." --Thomas Disch "Williamson's genius, for all its refinement, is strikingly tough and even defiant." --Richard Tillinghast