Between two silences

Disinheritance by John Sibley Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Sibley Williams' collection speaks with a deep melancholy, a pensive thoughtfulness, and a rich heart about our living beside the dead and our own dying. His diction is precise and when he twists the language at all it is because real pain twists us and our speaking. Whether in the predictable tragedies of losing grandparents and parents or the unpredictable and terrible loss of a child, Williams sings elegies of profound simplicity. Even in the birth of a child and the watching it grow through infancy and teething, the knowledge of death is a constant companion that adds poignancy and makes us love with terrible passion:

"Still there is love to be born
from unintended horizons
or shoveled dead into the waves,
weighed down with stars."


His verse lines often sprawls as if with desperation and no pause of punctuation possible:

"Now when I try to wash my hands of themselves the entire ocean turns red and without resolution my body alone unbuilds the sand."

He wonders on the consciousness of mortality that may be in the flights of birds or the songs of crickets, even as he knows intuitively our communion with them:

"that birds in time enjoy the tension between eating and being eaten b something larger."

"We are not so fortunate as cricket legs at dawn."

Our ultimate silence melded back into the earth and water is our song at last. But Williams here gives us a living song to sing between our two silences.

View all my reviews