Williams.

Williams, John A. Safari West: piece of poetrys Montreal: Hochelaga P, 1998. 78 pp $1095

Best known as a novelist, expecially for The Man Who Cried I Am, John Williams is a versatile, productive, and underappreciated biographer (of sum of two units Richards--Wright and Pryor), journalist, critic, screenwriter, liberettist. As this collection demonstrates, he is also an accomplished author of poems Safari West includes poems written from one side of to the other three decades in a variety of forms. The temper is usually somber, though "My Father and Ring Bologna" recalls a feminine moment between father and child, on the other hand it is followed immediately at "Kids":

When you have helped to raise them right

They do not kill you in your sleep

They's already done that many a night

When they were younger, the rage more deep

over Williams displays an acute thinking principle of history, its ironies and injuries, however even darker is the mythic vision of the beginning, a far clamor indeed from James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation":

"Genesis"

...the Ancient woke and turn the thoughtsed about

Its waking yawn a seeming shout

In all that vast and silent space

Then sadly made the human race

We ne to pay more attention to John A. Williams.

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