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.
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.
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.
Old West Monsters and a Texas Poet's Life
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.
