Taken together, the poems in The Nectar Dancer offer more than technical skill or thematic cohesion. They offer a vision of a way of being in the world. Williams writes with an attentive and tender gaze, one shaped over a long life of noticing, grounded in what actually matters.
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.
Taken together, the poems in The Nectar Dancer offer more than technical skill or thematic cohesion. They offer a vision of a way of being in the world. Williams writes with an attentive and tender gaze, one shaped over a long life of noticing, grounded in what actually matters.
These sixty-one poems, only a few of which are longer than a page, have the clarity and terseness that newspaper reporters strive for. No wonder—Donald Mace Williams spent most of his long adulthood as a newspaper writer and editor. They are his observations, full of joy and sadness, about life, loss, and nature.
Williams spent more than seventy years as a devoted student and amateur singer of German Lieder by Schubert and other great composers. That concentration may account in part for the metrical flow, the frequent rhymes, and the beginning-middle-and end structure of most of his poems.
Williams, now in his nineties, has always been a traditionalist in his literary and musical tastes. Meter and rhyme may be unfashionable today, but to Williams they remain, like him, alive and well.
Category: Poetry
Publication Date: August 21, 2023
ISBN (paper): 979-8-9864078-9-0
ISBN (ebook): 979-8-9864078-7-6
Trim Size: 5.06 x 7.1
List price: $14.95
Category: Poetry
Pages: 76
Kathryn Jones, award-winning journalist, poet, and author“Donald Mace Williams proves himself a keen observer of the inner and outer interwoven world in these poignant, personal, and universal poems. This collection blooms with familial celebrations and lamentations, the search for solace in nature, and the never-ending quest to know oneself. He shows that, in the end, we are all “nectar dancers” seeking beauty, sustenance, and connection.”
R. S. Gwynn, poet, anthologist, and professor emeritus, Lamar University“Like many of us, Donald Mace Williams shows his debt to Robert Frost. To be sure, the lone and level Panhandle of Canyon, Texas, seemingly has little in common with the elder poet’s New England. Even the snow lasts only till midday, when “the sun will take its half of what’s left.” A poet who lives in a flat place is bound to engage his world with irony, expressed in tart epigrams, sonnets, and carefully crafted blank verse. Having surpassed Frost in age, Williams is a worthy descendant of the Master and an expert reporter of what another Williams called ‘local conditions.’ You'll be charmed.”
Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas State Poet Laureate; member, Texas Institute“Although much of Donald Mace Williams’ poetry is written in strict poetic form, his handling of rhymed verse is so assured and subtly elegant that the reader is often unaware that the poems are “classically” formal. In The Nectar Dancer, Williams continues his formal mastery as he tackles a wide range of subjects as intriguingly variegated as his verbal kaleidoscope of allusion, from Euclid to a nursing home cat; from COVID to Mozart; and from poignant family poems to a cutting horse. I’m privileged to give The Nectar Dancer my highest recommendation.”
The Nectar Dancer is a collection of sixty-one short poems by Donald Mace Williams on life, loss, and nature. Most run under a page. Williams worked as a newspaper writer and editor for most of his adult life, and spent seventy years as a devoted amateur singer of German Lieder — both of which show in the compression and the metrical shape of the poems.
Short — sixty-one poems in seventy-six pages, only a few of them longer than a single page.
Yes. He works in meter and rhyme by conviction rather than habit — and says so plainly in the book.
Taken together, the poems in The Nectar Dancer offer more than technical skill or thematic cohesion. They offer a vision of a way of being in the world. Williams writes with an attentive and tender gaze, one shaped over a long life of noticing, grounded in what actually matters.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith, author of Saints of Sleeping and Waking, contributing editor for The Better Part, and finalist for Houston Poet Laurette
Read the full reviewKathryn Jones, award-winning journalist, poet, and author“Donald Mace Williams proves himself a keen observer of the inner and outer interwoven world in these poignant, personal, and universal poems. This collection blooms with familial celebrations and lamentations, the search for solace in nature, and the never-ending quest to know oneself. He shows that, in the end, we are all “nectar dancers” seeking beauty, sustenance, and connection.”
R. S. Gwynn, poet, anthologist, and professor emeritus, Lamar University“Like many of us, Donald Mace Williams shows his debt to Robert Frost. To be sure, the lone and level Panhandle of Canyon, Texas, seemingly has little in common with the elder poet’s New England. Even the snow lasts only till midday, when “the sun will take its half of what’s left.” A poet who lives in a flat place is bound to engage his world with irony, expressed in tart epigrams, sonnets, and carefully crafted blank verse. Having surpassed Frost in age, Williams is a worthy descendant of the Master and an expert reporter of what another Williams called ‘local conditions.’ You'll be charmed.”
Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas State Poet Laureate; member, Texas Institute“Although much of Donald Mace Williams’ poetry is written in strict poetic form, his handling of rhymed verse is so assured and subtly elegant that the reader is often unaware that the poems are “classically” formal. In The Nectar Dancer, Williams continues his formal mastery as he tackles a wide range of subjects as intriguingly variegated as his verbal kaleidoscope of allusion, from Euclid to a nursing home cat; from COVID to Mozart; and from poignant family poems to a cutting horse. I’m privileged to give The Nectar Dancer my highest recommendation.”
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.
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.
