Greg Williamson Selected Works

There's an extraordinary amount of wit and wordplay—outrageous puns, fractured homilies, garbled quotations, double entendres—in this short book. A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck recalls those planetarium shows that, in their vertiginous final minutes, whirl the audience through the cosmos.To say that Williamson is one of the three or four contemporary American masters of light verse may be a less grand pronouncement than it sounds, given how few serious poets these days would aspire to the title. Williamson's rhymes are likewise dexterous, with a number of unexpected combinations, and here and there he comes up with something so neatly preposterous that Byron might have been proud to claim it. The book holds up so well, richly repaying rereading, because there's a somber, eerie iciness at its core.

Greg Williamson's verbal wizardry is again on display in these funny and darkly serious poems. As Richard Wilbur said of his first collection, The Silent Partner, Williamson "is concerned . . . with the fugitive nature of all orderings."

And here, in the latest title in the Sewanee Writers' Series, the doublings and hidden dangers in life and language ricochet wildly, as in the quadruple look at people's relationship to nature and metaphor in "The Dark Days" or in the group of twenty-six "Double Exposures" where each poem has to be read three times. These obsessive themes lead to a final section about the difficulties of any artistic quest in these disordered times. We hear from a sesquipedalian security mirror and a disapproving muse, join in progress a medieval romance in a shopping mall, despair with Wile E. Coyote, and see the poet's frustrated efforts at a life in art in the title poem, a meditation on modern times—times filled with computer glitches, phone trees, and talk radio.

Winner of the 1995 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.

"Mr. Williamson is endowed with some of the rarest poetic faculties: an eye of engraver's accuracy, a fine linguistic flare, an enviable ability to use forms to his eloquent advantage, and a huge zest that is sometimes modified by sympathy, nostalgia, or an uncommon ability to adopt voices, views and feelings of others." —Anthony Hecht