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.

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.

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.

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.