Red Clay Journal

In the particular lies the universal, and RED CLAY JOURNAL, Harold Whit Williams' finest poetry collection yet, captures the fleetingness of life with an Eastern eye and a Southern drawl. The moments he distills are inextricably connected to his time and place-Alabamian adolescence, bittersweet odes to lost loved ones and landscapes-but they could be any and all times and places. Williams' poetry is deeply aware that the world is always disappearing, yet it is far from nihilistic. Add in his rock guitarist street cred, and his voice, as poet Will Wright noted, is "muscular and musical, at once dulcet and raucous." As a spiritual successor to the 19th-century Zen poet Gizan Zenrai (and anyone who has ever felt wistful thinking that everything we've ever known will one day vanish), Williams writes: "A child once again, / Gazing out to where forever ends. / Everything orbiting, gently orbiting."