“Donald Mace Williams’ Wolfe is a flawless epic, and in turning the legend of Beowulf into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature, it has a chance at ringing the bell of the current zeitgeist.”
Old West Monsters and a Texas Poet's Life
Wolfe and Being Ninety pairs two works by Donald Mace Williams. “Wolfe” retells Beowulf in late-nineteenth-century Texas, where Billy Wolfe hunts a creature that has killed livestock and a laborer on a remote ranch. “Being Ninety” is Williams’s memoir of nine decades — a Depression childhood, and a life as poet, journalist, professor, and trained singer.
“Donald Mace Williams’ Wolfe is a flawless epic, and in turning the legend of Beowulf into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature, it has a chance at ringing the bell of the current zeitgeist.”
Wolfe:
When a strange, beguiling creature is found to have slaughtered first the cattle of a lonely ranch in the late nineteenth-century Texas, then one of its laborers, the fate of the locals is placed in the hands of an out-of-towner, a calm and confident young man by the name of Billy Wolfe. In this epic adaptation, Donald Mace Williams, a Beowulf scholar who offered his own translation in Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, recasts the epic poem, setting it in the Old West and turning it into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature.
Being Ninety:
In Being Ninety, Williams recounts his more than nine decades as a child of the Depression, a poet, journalist, professor, classically trained singer, husband of 62 years, father, and lifelong wanderer. Williams’s life reads like a picaresque novel of Texas and many points farther afield. He forges on through his nineties on the strengths of his love of the prairies and his memories of his loving wife, Nell, and ultimately of his devotion to the writing life.
Joe Holley, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the Houston Chronicle’s “Native Texan” column“Donald Mace Williams proves to be both an able interpreter and a congenial guide to a place we’re all destined to inhabit, if we’re fortunate. For the young and the middle-aged, for those beyond middle age, Being Ninety is a welcome gift.”
Dana Gioia, former California state poet laureate and former chairperson, National Endowment for the Arts“It is a fine thing to see Donald Mace Williams's superb narrative poem, Wolfe, reprinted. Set on an isolated ranch toward the end of the Frontier days, Wolfe is part-Western, part-horror tale, but all epic in its imagination. This new book restores this fascinating work to the canon of contemporary narrative verse.”
Alan J. Altimont, associate professor of English, St. Edward's University“Not many of us make it into our nineties with all our marbles, and fewer still will have enough marbles to write with frankness and wit about our experience of advanced age. It’s a help, though, if, like Donald Mace Williams, you were blessed from the beginning with more marbles than most of the rest of us acquire and lose over our lifetimes. Poet, journalist, professor, classically trained singer, husband of 62 years, father, and lifelong wanderer, Williams’s life reads like a picaresque novel of Texas and many points farther afield. He forges on through his nineties on the strengths of his love of the prairies and his memories of his loving wife, Nell, and ultimately of his devotion to the writing life. Williams is a Texas treasure.
Wolfe and Being Ninety contains two works. “Wolfe” transplants Beowulf to a Texas ranch in the 1890s, where Billy Wolfe goes after something that has been killing stock and has now killed a man. “Being Ninety” is a memoir of Donald Mace Williams’s first nine decades — the Depression, newspaper work, teaching, sixty-two years of marriage, and a lifetime of singing
It is an adaptation, moving the story to a remote Texas ranch in the late nineteenth century. Williams also published a straight translation of the original, Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom.
Williams is a prolific author of poetry and prose, both fiction and nonfiction. His works include five other Stoney Creek titles: Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, The Nectar Dancer, Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Of Granddaughters and Mars and Timberline, U.S.A.
“Donald Mace Williams’ Wolfe is a flawless epic, and in turning the legend of Beowulf into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature, it has a chance at ringing the bell of the current zeitgeist.”
Timothy Green, editor
Joe Holley, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the Houston Chronicle’s “Native Texan” column“Donald Mace Williams proves to be both an able interpreter and a congenial guide to a place we’re all destined to inhabit, if we’re fortunate. For the young and the middle-aged, for those beyond middle age, Being Ninety is a welcome gift.”
Dana Gioia, former California state poet laureate and former chairperson, National Endowment for the Arts“It is a fine thing to see Donald Mace Williams's superb narrative poem, Wolfe, reprinted. Set on an isolated ranch toward the end of the Frontier days, Wolfe is part-Western, part-horror tale, but all epic in its imagination. This new book restores this fascinating work to the canon of contemporary narrative verse.”
Alan J. Altimont, associate professor of English, St. Edward's University“Not many of us make it into our nineties with all our marbles, and fewer still will have enough marbles to write with frankness and wit about our experience of advanced age. It’s a help, though, if, like Donald Mace Williams, you were blessed from the beginning with more marbles than most of the rest of us acquire and lose over our lifetimes. Poet, journalist, professor, classically trained singer, husband of 62 years, father, and lifelong wanderer, Williams’s life reads like a picaresque novel of Texas and many points farther afield. He forges on through his nineties on the strengths of his love of the prairies and his memories of his loving wife, Nell, and ultimately of his devotion to the writing life. Williams is a Texas treasure.
Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom is Donald Mace Williams’s translation of the oldest narrative poem in English, made to be read aloud rather than studied. He keeps the Anglo-Saxon kennings — the sea stays “whale paths” — works in four-stress iambic meter, and holds the scholarly apparatus down to eight endnotes.
Of Granddaughters and Mars is a poetry collection by Donald Mace Williams, written in traditional forms alongside riddles, monologues, and translations. The poems move between family tenderness and political anger — sequences on bugs and birds, a long poem reimagining the explorer Zebulon Pike, and closing translations from the German Romantics.
A 150th Anniversary Reader
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: A 150th Anniversary Reader is a selection translated by Donald Mace Williams, with the German and English printed on facing pages. Williams keeps Rilke’s meter rather than flattening it into free verse. His translation of “The Girl Grown Up” won the 2024 Der Hovanessian Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club.
The Nectar Dancer collects sixty-one short poems by Donald Mace Williams, most of them under a page. He spent his working life as a newspaper writer and editor, and the poems carry the compression reporters aim for — observations of life, loss, and the natural world, written in meter and rhyme.
High-Country Encounters from California to Maine
Timberline, U.S.A. is Donald Mace Williams’s account of the country above the last stunted pine, from California’s Sierra Nevada to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. A career journalist, Williams reports on the high places themselves and on the people who go up into them, asking what keeps drawing Americans into thin air and hard weather.
