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A review by balancinghistorybooks
Death the Barber by William Carlos Williams
4.0
The fortieth Penguin Modern publication is a collection of poetry by William Carlos Williams, entitled Death the Barber. The poems here are 'filled with bright, unforgettable images... [which] revolutionised American verse, and made him one of the greatest twentieth-century poets.' I do not recall having read any of Williams' work prior to this, and was expecting something akin to e.e. cummings. Whilst I was able to draw some similarities between the work of both poets, their work is certainly distinctive and quite vastly different from one another's.
The poems in Death the Barber are taken from various collections published between 1917 and 1962. Whilst I recognised 'This Is Just to Say', the rest of the poems here were new to me, and have certainly sparked an interest within me to read more of Williams' work. There is so much of interest here, and the varied themes and imagery made it really enjoyable. Whilst some of the poems seem simplistic at first, there is a lot of depth to them. I shall end this review with two of my favourite extracts from this brief collection.
From 'Pastoral':
The little sparrows
hop vigorously
about the pavement
quarrelling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.'
From 'To Waken an Old Lady':
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
The poems in Death the Barber are taken from various collections published between 1917 and 1962. Whilst I recognised 'This Is Just to Say', the rest of the poems here were new to me, and have certainly sparked an interest within me to read more of Williams' work. There is so much of interest here, and the varied themes and imagery made it really enjoyable. Whilst some of the poems seem simplistic at first, there is a lot of depth to them. I shall end this review with two of my favourite extracts from this brief collection.
From 'Pastoral':
The little sparrows
hop vigorously
about the pavement
quarrelling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.'
From 'To Waken an Old Lady':
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.