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.