“The quality of historical awareness appears subtly in poets who have it in abundance and crudely in those who are deficient. In the politically inflected section of this volume, Williams demonstrates rare deftness: fervent without being didactic. The veteran journalist’s breadth of artistic imagination confirms it. He plays with and contemplates interplanetary life, classical music, and American history as easily as he translates German Romanticism and grandfatherhood for those of us who don’t yet understand either.”
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.
“The quality of historical awareness appears subtly in poets who have it in abundance and crudely in those who are deficient. In the politically inflected section of this volume, Williams demonstrates rare deftness: fervent without being didactic. The veteran journalist’s breadth of artistic imagination confirms it. He plays with and contemplates interplanetary life, classical music, and American history as easily as he translates German Romanticism and grandfatherhood for those of us who don’t yet understand either.”
Donald Mace Williams’ latest poetry collection explores family, Texas, grief, war, aging, animals music, and language. Using traditional forms, riddles, monologues, and translations, Of Granddaughters and Mars blends family tenderness, political outcry, and formal inventiveness.
Williams uses wit and emotional range to question what beauty, truth, and courage can still mean in a world shaped by tyranny and loss. The collection also features playful sequences about bugs and birds, a long poem titled “Zebulon” that reimagines explorer Zebulon Pike, and closing translations from German Romantic poets.
Category: Poetry
Publication Date: August 17, 2026
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-965766-83-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-965766-84-2
List price: 16.95
Category: Poetry
Pages: 185
Trim size: 5.25 x 8
Publication date: August 4, 2026
Amit Majmudar, author of Things My Grandmother Said: Poems“Donald Mace Williams exhibits remarkable creativity in this collection of poems, published in his mid-nineties. His poems utilize meter and rhyme with ease, engaging with his own memories, recent news stories, and elements of his personal life, including the birthdays of his granddaughters. His tone is frequently conversational and always engaging. Some highlights include his poems about classical music. This is a collection that will stay with the reader, to use the poet's own words, ‘Like images of light on closed eyelids / Or french-horn resonances living on / In polished walls after a concert ends.’"
Of Granddaughters and Mars gathers Donald Mace Williams’s poems on family, Texas, grief, war, aging, animals, and language. Williams works in traditional forms — plus riddles, dramatic monologues, and translation — and uses that formal control to ask what beauty, truth, and courage still mean in a world shaped by tyranny and loss.
Largely yes. Williams works in traditional forms and adds riddles, monologues, translations, and adaptations, including closing translations from the German Romantic poets.
His other poetry includes Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Nectar Dancer, and his easy-to-use translation Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom. His other Stoney Creek titles include Wolfe and Being Ninety and Timberline, U.S.A.
“The quality of historical awareness appears subtly in poets who have it in abundance and crudely in those who are deficient. In the politically inflected section of this volume, Williams demonstrates rare deftness: fervent without being didactic. The veteran journalist’s breadth of artistic imagination confirms it. He plays with and contemplates interplanetary life, classical music, and American history as easily as he translates German Romanticism and grandfatherhood for those of us who don’t yet understand either.”
October 2026
Read MoreAmit Majmudar, author of Things My Grandmother Said: Poems“Donald Mace Williams exhibits remarkable creativity in this collection of poems, published in his mid-nineties. His poems utilize meter and rhyme with ease, engaging with his own memories, recent news stories, and elements of his personal life, including the birthdays of his granddaughters. His tone is frequently conversational and always engaging. Some highlights include his poems about classical music. This is a collection that will stay with the reader, to use the poet's own words, ‘Like images of light on closed eyelids / Or french-horn resonances living on / In polished walls after a concert ends.’"
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.
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.
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.
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.
