Critical Commentary
On Old-Love Poets: Commemorating a Long Love Affair:
“Old-Love Poems, a 50-year chronology from young, passionate desire to mature, deep love, inspires us to look at our relationships as ever-changing and enduring. The poems are beautiful and deeply moving. Beryle William’s sincerity, intelligence, and poetic style truly moved me…”
--Nina Drake, Instructor of English.
“A book of love poems is always appealing, especially one that celebrates something as rare these days as 50 years of marriage. I loved reading the book, and got a wonderful sense of the changes in the poet’s life and relationships. These poems are beautiful, some of them so wonderful and so expressive--reading them makes me want to write again!”
--Minette Riordan Ph.D., Publisher, Editor and Teacher of Creative Writing
“I have recently put down a book that delighted me: Old-Love Poems by Beryle Williams. As a poet myself I enjoy recommending a collection such as this one... It is a given that writing love poems is a risk. This poet has taken that challenge and met it tastefully. She succeeds in conveying love at its most complex. The poems take us through fifty years of marriage with its joys and difficulties. We are rewarded by insights into the fabric of a successful marriage as we are introduced to not only the relationship between this wife and this husband, but also to the love of these parents for their four children. All this without a trace of sentimentality. What a coup. . . Of course the themes that light the collection--although significant--can’t be appreciated without a careful crafting of language. Ms. Williams is an accomplished writer and her words demonstrate that. I say all this knowing how difficult it is to write even one good line of poetry.”
--Rita Brady Kiefer, Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies
Review of a poetry reading by Beryle Willliams
“It’s a great strategy when a writer can sneak past the obvious and the expected to explore the mysteries hidden below. …Williams makes poems out of old saddle shoes, family vacations, ballet lessons, and bicycles. Many…poems…start with the familiar and then plunge into other realities. Fishidi & Others begins with the boring details of middle-class life, ‘making plans/joining things, beginning/new groups,’ and then breaks open marvelously to reveal the uncertainties and fears that everyday busy-ness hides. Even as we sense ‘time that is going/ faster, becoming recklessly/ uneven. Even as we feel/ mass shimmying/ beneath us, we pick up the phone/. . . make appointments/ for the children’s teeth.’ Williams’ best poems move with energy from the ordinary and superficial to the place ‘where words, like ourselves/ are stopped/ at the primitive boundaries.’ The listener follows the movement of these poems with excitement and surprise. In The Monarchs, quoted just above…, she faces the realities that can’t be explained, and greets them with respect.”
--Todd Maitland, reviewer for The Loft
