44. our consolations,

if there are such things,
dwell in our conviction
that always somewhere
painters will concoct
their colors, poets sing,
and a single oboe

dutifully repeat
its lesson, then repeat
it again, serenely
mounting and descending
the stairway it itself
unfurls before itself.

The beauty here is visual as well as sonic, the poem becoming the staircase it describes, and with its repeated repetitions traversing and retraversing, like the oboe, its self-created space. And yet that second, quietly jarring line is perhaps the passage’s greatest, and certainly its most characteristic, felicity. / William Deresiewicz, NYT 15.2.04

THE SINGING
By C. K. Williams.
72 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20.