Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself

Meditating on his parents' marriage as well as his own thorny relationship with them, poet C.K. Williams forsakes the conventional memoir format in favor of a succession of lyrical short takes, some hardly more than a page long, that accrue to form an impressionistic portrait of two often unhappy people. Williams's father was a businessman whose work was "the defining essence of his life," a man who was often cruel to his family and made it a policy never to apologize. His mother, self-centered and pleasure-loving, remained haunted by childhood losses (including the sudden deaths of her father and two sisters) and by the poverty she suffered in the early years of her marriage. It's the kind of family in which a wife can say to her husband, "You used to be such a nice man," a father to his son, "You're a bastard, just like your mother." Yet Williams's spare, elegantly written elegy also contains tributes to his father's financial generosity (however controlling) and to his mother's stoicism as she lay dying from lung cancer. In the end, it's less the particulars of their failures that matter than the author's ability to transform painful feelings into transforming ones: "peace for rage, affection for frustration, devotion and compassion for misunderstanding." --Wendy Smith