Errors in the Script: Sewanee Writers Conference Series - Hardcover

Williamson, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585671177 ISBN 13: 9781585671175

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Williamson is the author of a previous collection of poetry, The Silent Partner. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

Ranging from brief pantoum to 12 rhyming riddles with multiple-choice answers (each true), Williamson's second collection of rigorously formal poems explores such subjects as a mockingbird who sits upon a surveillance camera and whoops the sounds of car alarms, a frustrated newlywed looking for real estate online, and window-shopping at a suburban Virginia mall this last with giddy annotations and Beowulf-like marginalia. The centerpiece of the collection is a series of 25 "double exposures" (a form Williamson invented) made of two interlocking six-line poems, the lines barely overlapping like a zipper down the middle of the page. Each stands in for an imagined series of paired photographs, ranging from "Girl Hugging Snowman with Broken Goddamn Radiator" to "Medical School Skeleton with Dominoes Pizza Man" to "Half Border Collie, Half Black Strip": "The dog is leaping, poised for midflight,/ An emblematic darkness swallowing/ A Frisbee. There he stays, suspended in/ The Present tense, where night keeps following." Many of the other poems opt for banal juxtapositions of high and low that are not nearly as outr‚ as the poet seems to think they are; the Road Runner, for example, is described as "the plum‚d cuckoo." But Williamson's line breaks can be arresting ("Not many trees survive our satellite/ Communities"), and underneath the pop references and formal bounds, the poet seeks the various blank fields where inscription occurs a blank sheet of paper, a life and finds that errors are "genetically" inevitable. They make this script entertaining and humane. (Apr.)Forecast: Williamson's 1995 debut, The Silent Partner, was matched with a Whiting Award and a teaching gig at Johns Hopkins. Fans of Glyn Maxwell or Anthony Hecht (who, along with a quadumvirate of other men John Hollander, Donald Justice, Mark Strand and Alan Shapiro provides a blurb) will find a lot to like here if they can find the book.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Williamson, who won the Nicholas Roerich Prize for his first collection, presents an unusual mix in his second book: modernist poems with a formalist touch. Full of wordplay and inventive language, these poems range widely in subject, as the titles indicate: "Origami," "Kites at the Washington Monument," and "The Muse Addresses the Poet (and getteth alle up in hys face)." Yes, Williamson has a humorous touch, as in these lines: "If soup is ready-to-eat, what soup is not?/ The kind that's rice, a chicken and a pot...." The whole middle section consists of a long poem called "Double Exposures." Obviously inspired by photographs, this poem consists of 26 sections, each presenting a two-skeined poem with two unconnected stories alternating lines. A few from this section did not work at all, and sometimes Williamson can be too clever, to the detriment of his poetry, as when he includes a time limit and answer sheet for the poem "Riddles." But when he is not pushing the cleverness factor, Williamson writes some interesting, accessible poems. Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1585671177
• ISBN 13: 9781585671175
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160