Using traditional forms, monologues, riddles, and translations, this collection of poems from Donald Mace Williams links personal memory and family tenderness with tyranny, war, technology, and death, asking what beauty, truth, and courage can still mean.
This collection spans political outcry, Martian speculation, Texas landscapes, aging, grief, and exuberant love for grandchildren, music, animals, and language. Using traditional forms, it links personal memory and family tenderness with tyranny, war, technology, and death, asking what beauty, truth, and courage can still mean. Later sequences play with bugs and birds in witty monologues, and with Anglo‑Saxon–style riddles that personify forces like water, speech, time, and death as double-edged presences in human life. The long poem “Zebulon” reimagines explorer Zebulon Pike, probing flawed heroism, misreading, and the obsessive lure of sources and summits. The volume closes with formal translations and adaptations of German Romantic poets, extending its concerns with love, suffering, reconciliation, fate, and the power and danger of words themselves.
Category: Poetry
Publication Date: August 4, 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.’"
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.’"
A 150th Anniversary Reader
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote many short lyric poems of remarkable beauty and intensity. Donald Mace Williams has selected some of the best and brought these works of one of the 20th century’s most influential poet to English-speaking audiences.
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.
This new translation of the oldest narrative poem in English—the first in more than twenty years—is designed for easy, pleasant reading. It cuts the scholarly touches to a minimum, using simple margin notes to explain some word or phrase. With students, young readers, and Beowulf fans in mind, Donald Mace Williams has approached his translation as both a published writer of modern metrical poems and a scholar in the verse structure of Beowulf.
In this epic re-release, Donald Mace Williams adapts Beowulf to late nineteenth-century Texas in Wolfe. In Being Ninety, he reflects on more than nine decades of devotion to the writing life.
