[In the following excerpt, Saunders offers a generally positive assessment of A Dream of Mind, while noting that Williams's long lines and ordinary language occasionally fall flat.]

Doubters who think [John] Ashbery reduces mental activity to a kind of effete daydreaming could try C. K. Williams's latest collection A Dream of Mind. Here the title sequence investigates ‘this mind streaming through me, its turbulent stillness, its murmur, inexorable, beguiling’ but at least sets out with ‘a dream of method,’ however intractable its potential application. He still believes that ‘these parcels of experience have a significance beyond their accumulation. … solutions are implied’ and is prepared to ‘butt in’ (‘Vocations’) to distill a kind of faith from ‘the fearful demands consciousness makes for linkage, coherence, congruence.’ The faith can only be ‘partial, imperfect,’ threatened by ‘imperious laws of doubt and denial,’ closer indeed to ‘dread’ in contemplating ‘the sad molecule of the self in its chunk of duration’ (‘The Gap’). The self may be ‘fleeting, dissolving,’ ‘my character has become the function of its own revisions,’ yet he can entertain the hypothesis of its being ‘more than the field of these interchangings’ (‘Shadows’). The series moves towards ‘Light,’ title of the final poem, though nightmare always lurks in the darkness at the edge of the dream, the nightmare of ‘having so little power, even over my own consciousness,’ but drawing on mental powers beyond analysis he can recapture an innocence stronger than despair: ‘I imagine myself in that healing accord I still somehow believe must precede or succeed dream.’

There may be a certain amount of camouflaged theology here, in contrast with Ashbery's resolutely secular drift. The dream can be a kind of ethical project, involving the imagination and the heart: ‘Heart’ he wonders in ‘Shells,’ ‘ever unworthy of you, lost in you, will I ever truly dream you, or dream beyond you?’ It is a question which preoccupies him through the book, especially in the second section ‘Some of the Forms of Jealousy,’ where we meet precise notation and an awareness of other people and situations, though ‘this unsavoury, unsilent solitude of self’ remains locked in unending soliloquy, sometimes comic in tone, like the anguished articulate self-tormentors of Bellow or Heller, sometimes witty and detached. In ‘Signs,’ dinner with a friend whose wife he comes to feel must have a lover, signalled by ‘complex inward blushes of accomplishment, achievement, pride’ though perhaps unsuspected by her husband leads into an extended, Titanic metaphor as the social forms are maintained whatever the stresses and strains below the surface: ‘I ply my boilers too; my workers hum: light the deck lamps, let the string quartet play.’ In ‘The Cautionary’ the husband's mad logic leaves Othello standing as his suspicious scrutiny colludes in its own sadly self-fulfilling prophesy: ‘Yes. No. Yes. He knows he should stop all this: but how can he without going to the end?’ In the last of them, ‘Soliloquies’ it seems this world of overwhelming and unspoken questions might be grounded in ‘a more radical uncertainty.’ If love ‘with its promise of certainties the only answer to these doubts’ cannot hold its own against the melancholy long with-drawing roar Arnold heard on Dover Beach, is God too ‘potentially beloved other … who already has sufficient knowledge of our fate to heal us, but may well decide not to do so’?

If Williams's habitual long line occasionally sags, the language a little ordinary, in the title sequence sometimes smacking of rejected passages from Four Quartets, he is more often rigorous and alert, with the American knack of modulating from the informal and prosaic to a commanding rhetoric, as in ‘The Insult’ which seems to link both Stevens and Frost. He can tell a good story too, whether the Freudian anecdote of ‘Child Psychology,’ or ‘Allies: According to Herodotus,’ where the affronted Xerxes en route for Greece chops his host's son in two and marches his army between the halves. I'm less sure about ‘She, Though,’ the extended narrative of love among the artists maybe with autobiographical elements which makes up the third section, a kind of ‘groping dialectic’ about art and death. The protagonist, perhaps a Stephen Dedalus to the mature Williams's Joyce, comes to understand that ‘what art needed at the end / was an acceptance of what's muddled and confused in us’ rather than ‘the mastery of expression’ supposedly attained by his antagonist, the girl he once rejected. There's more muddle than I can accept and for more than a hundred years the novelists have been refining these nuances with greater lucidity. In the final piece, ‘Helen’ he does regain the unflinching clarity of shorter poems like ‘Harm’ and ‘Scar’ in contemplating the last illness of his (it reads as autobiography though distanced by the third person) wife. The subject is really not unlike Poe's ‘Ligeia’ without the note of hysteria, the death of a beautiful woman providing a near-mystical climax:

‘she had entered death, he was with her in it.
Death was theirs, she'd become herself again; her final,
searing loveliness had been revealed.’