There is something profoundly brave about choosing the haiku form to document an entire year of living. The constraints are severe, the margin for error nonexistent. Yet Kentucky tree farmer and poet Charles Dowling Williams embraces these limitations with the confidence of someone who has spent decades listening to the land. The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams represents his fifth haiku collection, and it arrives as perhaps his most ambitious and spiritually resonant work to date.
The collection opens with borrowed wisdom from Mary Oliver, whose three-line instruction serves as both epigraph and methodology: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. Williams has clearly internalized this directive. What unfolds across these pages is not merely nature poetry but a sustained act of witness, a devotional practice disguised as verse.
The Architecture of Attention
Williams structures his collection chronologically, beginning in May 2024 and concluding in June 2025. This calendar-year framework allows readers to experience the full rotation of seasons at West Wind Farm, the Kentucky property that serves as both home and muse. The organizational choice proves inspired, transforming individual haiku into interconnected movements within a larger symphony.
What distinguishes this collection from typical nature poetry is Williams’s refusal to prettify or sentimentalize. His observations carry the weight of accumulated experience, the kind that comes from decades of walking the same trails, noting the same trees, tracking the same creatures through their cycles of arrival and departure. When he writes of slugs leaving silver trails on his ceiling or dogs playing in mud ponds, these moments feel earned rather than invented.
The title itself references an extraordinary natural phenomenon that anchors the collection. Brood XIV of the seventeen-year periodical cicada emerged during the period covered by these poems, flooding Kentucky with over 400 million insects whose combined wings numbered in the hundreds of millions. Williams documents this emergence with wonder that never tips into excess, finding in these ancient creatures a metaphor for patience, emergence, and the mysterious intelligence of nature.
Craft and Technique in Traditional Form
The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams demonstrates mastery of the haiku form while remaining accessible to readers unfamiliar with its conventions. Williams adheres largely to the traditional seventeen-syllable structure across three lines, though he occasionally allows himself small liberties in service of meaning. This flexibility suggests a poet who understands that form should illuminate rather than constrain.
Several technical elements deserve particular attention:
- Seasonal markers (kigo): Williams employs traditional seasonal references while grounding them in specifically American, specifically Kentuckian contexts
- Cutting words and juxtaposition: Many poems pivot on unexpected connections between observed phenomena
- Concrete imagery: Abstract concepts consistently anchor themselves in sensory detail
- Humor: A gentle wit surfaces throughout, preventing the collection from becoming overly solemn
- Contextual notes: Brief prose introductions to certain poems provide helpful background without over-explaining
The interplay between haiku and accompanying notes creates a hybrid form that honors tradition while acknowledging contemporary readers may benefit from additional context. When Williams mentions that walnut trees rarely hold their leaves into October, or explains the derivation of a tractor’s nickname, these details enrich rather than diminish the poetry.
Thematic Currents Running Through the Collection
While The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams resists easy thematic summary, several preoccupations surface repeatedly across its pages.
The relationship between permanence and transience emerges as central. Cicadas that have lived underground for seventeen years take wing for forty days of light before dying. Snow that stays for three days waits for more snow. Dogs age, seasons turn, and the poet himself acknowledges the passage of time through references to hearing loss and memory. Yet against this backdrop of impermanence, certain constants endure: the return of geese to their nests, the reliability of spring peepers, the annual miracle of daffodils.
Domesticity and wildness coexist comfortably in Williams’s vision. Farm dogs share pages with wild turkeys. Kitchen sounds mingle with thunder. Slugs become houseguests rather than pests, transported to safety rather than killed. This porousness between human and natural worlds suggests an ecological consciousness that feels neither preachy nor performative.
The collection also meditates quietly on solitude and companionship. Many poems describe moments of singular observation, the poet alone at 2 a.m. listening to dogs breathe or watching the moon set over snow. Yet these solitary moments feel populated by presence, whether canine, avian, or celestial. The dedication to Maryglenn and occasional references to shared experiences remind readers that this attention to the world exists within a context of human connection.
Continuity With Previous Work
Readers familiar with Williams’s earlier collections will recognize characteristic concerns and techniques in this new volume. The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams builds upon foundations established in Seasons at West Wind Farm, The Green Roar of Zen, Echo Ridge, and Visible Magic, the latter of which earned recognition as a Distinguished Favorite in the Independent Press Awards.
The new collection includes several haiku originally published in these earlier volumes, now recontextualized within the calendar-year structure. This recycling of material might concern some readers, but it ultimately serves the collection’s larger purpose of documenting cyclical time. Seasons repeat, observations recur, and the poetic record accumulates like sedimentary layers.
Williams has drawn comparisons to Wendell Berry, and the connection seems apt. Both writers root their work in specific Kentucky landscapes, both resist the temptation to romanticize rural life while clearly loving it, and both understand that attention to place constitutes a form of moral practice.
Essential Qualities for Poetry Readers
What makes The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams particularly valuable for contemporary readers includes:
- Accessibility without sacrifice of depth: These poems reward both casual reading and sustained study
- Ecological awareness: The collection models attentive relationship with the natural world
- Formal discipline: Williams demonstrates that traditional constraints can produce fresh observations
- Regional specificity: Kentucky emerges as a fully realized place rather than generic pastoral backdrop
- Spiritual resonance: Without explicit religiosity, the poems carry contemplative weight
The Thanksgiving prose piece that concludes the collection deserves special mention. In it, Williams describes the cicada emergence in detail, revealing the wonder that inspired the title and connecting his observations to questions of intelligence, instinct, and the sacred. This prose coda provides satisfying closure while opening interpretive possibilities.
Recommended Reading for Those Who Appreciate This Collection
Readers drawn to The Million Wings of May by Charles Dowling Williams may also find resonance in these works:
- The Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass, featuring Basho, Buson, and Issa
- Devotions by Mary Oliver
- This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry
- The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Final Reflections
The haiku form asks practitioners to say much with little, to trust that compression intensifies rather than diminishes meaning. Charles Dowling Williams has spent a lifetime cultivating this trust, and the result is a collection that feels simultaneously modest and vast. These poems will reward readers who approach them slowly, allowing each seventeen-syllable observation to expand in the imagination.
For those seeking poetry that reconnects them with seasonal rhythms, that celebrates the ordinary miracles of the natural world, and that demonstrates how sustained attention can become a spiritual practice, this collection offers genuine gifts. The million wings referenced in the title beat not only in the Kentucky woods but within these carefully crafted pages, carrying readers toward wonder.
