The Secret Book of God

Ric Williams

Williams’ the secret book of god speaks to the mythic archetypes that reside in all of us in a voice that is soulful, intelligent, and full of imagery. This book is a journey into mythopoetics for academics and laymen alike. Williams writes with an almost eerie insight into human nature that quenches the popular thirst for expressions of longing and intimacy so prevalent in today’s internet-centered society.

Many of the poems in the secret book of god possess a healing quality as they reach deep and bring a light to that place in us where self-love is often overshadowed by old wounds. While other poems are soul-searching journeys that begin as a poet’s dream and carry us through imagery to the realization of our own personal longings.

Williams is an unsung philosopher with a gift for interpreting the human psyche through the poetics of image. It is through such imagery that the secret book of god offers readers a glimpse into the human heart that will deepen their own journey into the richness of soul territories they have for too long been too wounded to explore.

Ric Williams was born in Arkansas in 1952. He began acting and writing early and has been interested in the slippery nature of consciousness ever since. He received his master’s degree in mythology with an emphasis in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 1998.

Williams has edited the Litera listings of The Austin Chronicle since 1988. He wrote the “Poet’s Beat” column (interviews with local poets) for The Austin Light from 1987-1991. He edited for Ed Buffalo’s poetry anthologies Aileron and Vowel Movement in the late 80’s and early 90’s and was the associate editor from 1997-1999 for Alchemy on Sunday, the literary journal of Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Williams has written and/or edited for the Austin Chronicle, Man! Magazine, the Salt Journal, and Creative Pulse Magazine. Williams’ interview with Larry McMurtry is included in Conversations with Texas Writers, published in March 2005 by UT Press.

Although Williams’ poetry has been featured in many publications over the years, this is his first solo collection of poems. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his artist wife Christy Kale and their daughters Kady and Ramona.

Praise for the secret book of god:

“A remarkable and powerful expression of soul, The Secret Book of God can only be shared like a quest for the “mythogenic” center of our most deeply held knowing. Like every best kept, The Secret Book of God is one of Austin’s finer secrets…although, not for long.” -Stephanie Pope, author of Like A Woman Falling

“Tenacious insight exposes us for “what is shameful / is only what we refuse to love.” He shocks our traditional senses with gentle reticence, almost whispering, “where in the void of god . . . ” and turning insightful sensitive moments of words hewn from the clay of language into shape and form “perhaps we are to dreams what landscapes are to us.”

Ric Williams helps us ask the questions we dare not utter, “what the meaning of existence had to do with existence,” as we search our lives for “lost Arthurs,” and realize that some days “a description of pain ad infinitum only crying will do / or a knife & a long hill / to plunge the blade / of all that can’t be said.”