Sacred

These poems explore what is in the word "sacred" for our world and what is in our world for the word "sacred."

Sacred points to a threshold or meeting place where the transcendent and the immanent pull together and are held somewhere. Finding that place and constituting it is the work of this volume of poems. They range from meditative lyrics to modernizations of Shakespeare's sonnets to children's poems. Some are allusive, reviving stories of ancient mythology, putting Ovidian characters in contact with Christian love. Others foreground figures from sacred texts, like Adam and Ruth. William's style throughout is lucid, concise, and beautiful, with tones that move gracefully between elegiac and playful, serious and romantic.