The Wages of Love

Winner of the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Wages of Love is a splendidly wide-ranging poetry collection, delving into the mysteries of love, the complexities of relationship, the joy of family, and the splendor of the natural world. As Margaret Gibson notes, the book is "finely crafted and deeply felt . . . a harvest of richly remembered and embellished moments whose nature includes inquiry, affirmation, passion, tender remorse, wistful encounter, honest compassion, wise joy. At home with narrative as well as with lyric reflection, Williams fully inhabits his poems with mellow humor and pleasure, without shirking the darker imponderables and challenges that come with learning to be fully human, or as he puts it, learning to be a 'good man.' This is a good man, and a good poet. How do we live, knowing that we will die? This ages-old question, though never asked directly in the book, may be central to these poems, which answer this way: we love. And the wages of love? More life: a tenderness toward existence, with all its endings and new beginnings."