HumanCoverings.

The Book

Miller Williams

I held it in my hands while he told the story.

He had found it in a fallen bunker,

a book for notes with all the pages blank.

He took it to keep for a sketchbook and diary.

He learned years later, when he showed the book

to an old bookbinder, who paled, and stepped back

a long step and told him what he held,

what he had laid the days of his life in.

It’s bound, the binder said, in human skin.

I stood turning it over in my hands,

turning it in my head.  Human skin.

What child did this skin fit?  What man, what woman?

Dragged still full of its flesh from what dream?

Who took it off the meat?  Some other one

who stayed alive by knowing how to do this?

I stared at the changing book and a horror grew,

I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is,

how beautiful it was until I knew.

Fortunately near the end of the poem the realization that the author isn't talking about an actual book made from human skin  was very helpful in trying to figure out what this poem is saying.
"I held it in my hands while he told the story..." The significance of this beginning is in the simplicity of it, automatically the author has the reader glued in on guessing what the story may be about and what the end of it will conclude.
As the poem furthers in stanza 4 the drama of the poem enfolds, the book that he held was of human skin. He wondered who's could it be a child? A man? A woman? But prior the knowledge he had recieved the book had been a thing of beauty that he could look at.
The authors structure with the poem has an emphasis for dramatic elements, he places the spaces where they are to dramatize the piece. Williams also consistently is asking questions of why? how? and who?
Which really puts it on the reader themselves to answer for him, although there may not even be a sufficient answer to the question.

Again, the book is not of ACTUAL human skin, that would be quite horrifying- but rather the book is his life. The life that he is looking at could give him disgust and horror because he refused to do anything of real merit. The book was "found in a fallen bunker", it had been mistreated and forgotten, until the realization of someone else brought about the idea unto the person whos life is written on those pages.
The book is a symbol of cruelty, being that the person who is holding the book finds its past to be horrifying, which could also be a metaphor for someones life.

What the poem chooses to focus on isn't the content of the book, but rather the cover of it. The cover which binds this book is the importance.