Flesh and blood - C. K. Williams

C.K. Williams (1936-2015) was the most challenging American poet of his generation, a poet of intense and searching originality who made lyric sense out of the often brutal realities of everyday life. His poems are startlingly intense anecdotes on love, death, secrets and wayward thought, examining the inner life in precise, daring language. Flesh and Blood was his first collection to be published in the UK, appearing simultaneously with Poems 1963-1983 covering his earlier work. Published in the US a year earlier, it won the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987.