Fallacies of Motion
These poems were taken from a diary of poems and sketches kept over forty years. In retrospect they have a repeating pattern of awareness and lack of awareness, of uncomfortably being in society and more comfortably slipping back to be in nature. When analysis fails, as it always does, the poet slips back again inside his skin. It is a journey to no place except home.
Reviews
Here is contemporary wisdom in verse. Imagine ancient Solomon revived and even more cynical, witty, precise, and scathing. These lyrics are delightfully arch and delicately stern. They range from wry takes on technology and white-collar conundrums to introspective riffs on grief, loss and the compensations of travel.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
William Nichols has created a series of poems here that challenge readers to re-examine their views of the most fundamental of relationships – those between us and all living things. Whether they are in our human existence or in the natural world surrounding us, the reader will soon recognize the broad convergence employed to appreciate the transitory nature of all living things. Human pack rats, stray dogs and damaged, doomed shorebirds find their way into our consciousnesses. Nichols’ poems are neither obsequious nor sentimental. His long- practiced objectivity finds its way through the inner worlds of reactionaries, bureaucrats and magpies, as he shares this storehouse of observations. There is a long vision to this work.
— Dean Morrison McKenzie
