Elegies for the Water is a beautiful and mature book of poems steeped in the joys and mysteries of the natural world. Though he has been writing and publishing poems in such magazines as Poetry for his entire career, this is Philip Lee Williams's first volume of poetry. In this collection, Williams shows again his well-known ability to combine the arresting image with the moment of sudden insight.
Deeply intertwined with the natural world of his Georgia country home, Williams's poems are testaments both to time-tested forms and the free impulse of contemporary verse. While his poems are often clear and sharp as a winter stream, he also writes with a healthy respect for the dense, iconoclastic masters of twentieth-century poetry and from centuries before, examining order and disorder in the human and natural worlds with the kind of fascinated and passionate scrutiny he has shown in many earlier books.
Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Philip Lee Williams’s latest book is the massive novel The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, published in late 2011. His new novel, Emerson’s Brother, will be published in late spring 2012.
In 2011, the University of Georgia Press published a new edition of Williams's award-winning Civil War novel, A Distant Flame. This novel originally published by St. Martin's in 2004, was winner of the Michael Shaara Prize, given to the best single Civil War novel published in the United States the previous year.
Williams’s much-praised book-length poem, The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram, came out in the fall of 2010. It was named Book of the Year by the national literary journal Books and Culture and won Williams his fourth Georgia Author of the Year Award.
All of Williams’s books are for sale at numerous online outlets and at many bookstores around the world. In addition, his works are in hundreds of libraries around the globe.
Symphony No. 17: Tenebrae
This symphony is subtitled "Tenebrae," which is a religious service in the Christian church but literally means "shadows" or "darkness" in Latin. It is a quiet, contemplative symphony, a single movement for full orchestra. (29'48")
Symphony No. 18: For the Civil Rights Martyrs
This work is subtitled "For the Civil Rights Martyrs" and is in memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 while working for Civil Rights. It is also in memory of all who died in the struggle. It is in two movements, "The Lynching" and "Souls."
One: The Lynching (15'25")
Two: Souls (14'25")
Symphony No. 17: Tenebrae
This symphony is subtitled "Tenebrae," which is a religious service in the Christian church but literally means "shadows" or "darkness" in Latin. It is a quiet, contemplative symphony, a single movement for full orchestra. (29'48")
Symphony No. 18: For the Civil Rights Martyrs
This work is subtitled "For the Civil Rights Martyrs" and is in memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 while working for Civil Rights. It is also in memory of all who died in the struggle. It is in two movements, "The Lynching" and "Souls."
One: The Lynching (15'25")
Two: Souls (14'25")
