A Crowd of Voices

Stephen J. Williams

I found this Australian collection of poetry while looking up Richard Lortz's recently-dustbunnied novel of the same title while researching the review of it, and the coincidence was amusing enough that I went out and picked up a copy of this (not nearly as easy as I'm making it sound, it's been out of print for a while; I have since found out the author has it as a free e-book on his website. grumble.). My recent explorations into the world of as-yet-unfamiliar-to-me poetry have been something less than pleasing, so I went into this book without too much hope.

The first two lines of the first poem, “The High Price of Travelling,” seemed to confirm my worst fears: “Even though our eyes are bruised/From reading all the daily news…” I almost threw the thing across the room and jumped away from it as if it were a tarantula. However, I steeled myself and went on. Not a bad choice, as those are the only two rhyming lines couched in a free-verse poem in the book, and the only time Williams ever stretches far enough to use a filler word in order to pick up the rhythm (“all” turns it from a poetic line into something out of a pop song. A very bad pop song). Bear with us, though. I should have been thinking “after that, where is there to go but up?”

Williams does go up. He doesn't hit the heights of a David St. John or an Ira Sadoff, but don't stick him in the same bin as Rod McKuen. There's nothing all too new here, but every once in a while Williams comes up with some excellent phrasing, and everything falls together quite nicely:

Some of the men cry, and many of the women
Make impossible devotions. Some others
Who are neither men nor women go about their work
Invisibly – or else, becoming.
(from “Hunger”)

The only other major problem in the work, aside form those first two lines, is that Williams has the type of social conscience that manifests itself with a sledgehammer (cf. such titles as “The Weight of Freedom” and “The King of Hate,” which have roughly the content one would expect from such titles). Not to say, of course, that Williams is being wrongheaded in his social values. As we have seen thousands, if not millions, of times over, though, socially conscious poetry tends to find itself mired in metaphor rather than letting the images impart the metaphor.

This is not an unreadable book, to say the least, and while some of what's here could have used reworking, there are enough moments of small pleasure contained therein for the average poetry fan to consider picking it up, if you find it easier to come across than did I.