Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems

Federico García Lorca did not know Miller Williams, of course, but he was describing him when he told us that a poet is “professor of the five senses.” The poems in this collection cover thirty years of loving contact with the endlessly varied surfaces of the world. They are poems in which the common furniture of our lives is always present, in which the universal resides in the local, in which elegance is born of clarity.

We have enough to fret about.
Almost all of us concur,
we’ll live wit...