The Nectar Dancer

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.