A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

“Anyone who’s read Greg Williamson’s previous books has been necessarily astonished by this poet’s intellectual scope, wicked humor and truly stunning formal virtuosity. His books, The Silent Partner and Errors In The Script have placed him at the lead of younger poets writing in America today. But apparently that’s not good enough for him. In his wildly ambitious and satisfying new collection, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, Williamson literally takes on the universe – the sun, moon, stars, the great unknowns of space, evolution, procreation – you name it. This poet’s got an opinion. And in a sonnet sequence no less! But these aren’t in any way your grandma’s sonnets – these are contemporary rhythms that feel utterly relevant while reminding us that music is still the pulse-quickening essence of poetry. What an extraordinary accomplishment this book is. In case you were wondering, the bar has definitely been raised.” – Erin Belieu

“The sonnet in English, which has changed only incrementally since Wyatt passed off Petrarch’s sonnets as his own, metamorphoses further with Greg Williamson’s brilliant inventions. I imagine a time when his particular form of the little song may even take on his name and be added to the distinguished list: the Petrarchan sonnet, the Shakespearean sonnet, the Miltonic sonnet, the Williamsonnet. I mean it. And this sequence deserves to take its place with the best.” – Mark Jarman

“Who ever would have thought that so many sonnets could still be so much fun? From birth to death, from the self to the cosmos, Greg Williamson’s energetic sequence takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the external and internal universe. Along the way he updates and invigorates the form of the sonnet itself. Like the range of his subjects, his diction winds, bends, lurches, and leaps from the scientific (‘thermohaline,’ ‘foraminifers,’ ‘isobars’), to the accurate but fanciful (‘Snood, Shako, Tam-o-shanter, Shriner fez’), to the invented (‘enrichum lawyericulum,’ ‘golfonaut,’ ‘blingblingitis’). The poems amuse, impress, and finally dazzle us. Williamson may often seem drunk on language, but he is always sober in his thinking. He takes an ordinary phenomenon like water, or a hat, then finds an appropriate cliché (‘we’re all wet,’ ‘under your hat’) and plumbs both of them, expanding, opening them up, looking at them anew. Words are his materials, and he uses them like a master craftsman. Out of carbon he makes diamonds.” – Willard Spiegelman

Reviews of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011
"The impulse to create a stylistic tour de force can lead easily to wayward literary pilgrimages … It’s a danger Williamson largely circumvents through sheer cleverness: there’s an extraordinary amount of wit and wordplay – outrageous puns, fractured homilies, garbled quotations, double entendres – in his short book.

A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck recalls those planetarium shows that, in their vertiginous final minutes, whirl the audience through the cosmos …

Cleverness of this high-flying sort can transport a book … quite some distance, but on its own probably would be insufficient to make A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck the success that it is. The book holds up so well, richly repaying rereading, because there’s a somber, eerie iciness at its core. Human mortality is the grim, presiding overseer of these sixty-nine sonnets … These poems have a genuine touch of timor mortis conturbat me … the phrase from the Latin Office of the Dead that appears as refrain in a number of English medieval poems.

The cartoonlike aspects of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck reassure us that everything is altright. In the Land of Animation, you can fall off a towering cliff or be flattened by an anvil, sizzle in a bolt of lightning or be encased in a block of ice, and no harm is done; nothing is more comic than indestructibility. And nothing’s more tragic than perishability. Timor mortis … Readers of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck – this, yes, marvelous book – are now and then disturbingly aware that behind its jokes is an apparition whose skeletal smile is no joke at all." – Brad Leithauser

Able Muse, Winter 2008
"I am grateful to Williamson for his wit, his technical gifts, his vitality – and also his willingness to experiment. The poems [in this book] contain, just like his early volumes, numerous examples of lines that lodge themselves in the reader’s mind thanks to their witty deftness and lyrical elegance …

Perhaps what is most striking is his ability to marry a gift for witty concision with a sense of imaginative openness; the phrases strike one for their pithy pointedness and then expand in the mind thanks to their evocative and suggestive power. A fine example is his neat encapsulation of the history of mankind after the discovery of fire in the first quatrain of the sonnet entitled “Fire”:

Imagine that first fire, the doubletakes
Among the vegans, cold, dark wet: Cave guy
Strikes flint and, boom, you’re grilling mammoth steaks,
You’re holding hands, you’re hooking up, you’re dry…

A lot of history there: anthropological, social and scientific; and all got across with laconic humour and colloquial sharpness.

An even pithier example of concentrated meaning can be found in the first four words of the very first sonnet in the book, “Time”:

Time was, it wasn’t.

From this abrupt opening, the reader feels assured of an invigorating if occasionally bewildering journey. And Williamson certainly does not disapppoint. While I doubt I will ever fully understand all the poems, I know that I will continue to return to them and to delight in the riches of what he refers to in one sonnet, with comic self-deprecation, as the ‘enlaced rhyme’s lamentable, loony verse’. And I can’t wait to see where Williamson goes from here." – Gregory Dowling

To read the whole of Gregory Dowling’s lengthy article, please click link: Read whole article

The Yale Review, Fall 2008
“[A]mong the canniest and most nimble-witted of American poets … Williamson, whose previous collection, Errors in the Script, demonstrated his powers of tour-de-force formal invention … here creates his own sonnet form … Science, technology, sports, politics, music, social satire, nautical history, pop culture: such far-flung realms of thought and language jostle each other in a democracy of tropes, frequently within a single poem … Williamson’s wild inventiveness – formal, linguistical – would be a trap for lesser poets, his masks at times so elaborate and seamless that only a poet of the first order could speak affectingly through them. When on his game, which he is most of the time, Williamson manages to do just that. His dazzling poems leap from the ludic to the mordant and back." – David Yezzi

Times Literary Supplement, 12 September 2008
“In the Oxford Book of Light Verse, apart from the reminder that light verse is ‘serious’, W.H. Auden identified three kinds: that for performance, nonsense poetry and that ‘having for its subject-matter the everyday social life of its period or the experiences of the poet as an ordinary human being’. In today’s multicultural environment, this last can be an elusive precondition, but Williamson succeeds brilliantly as he plunges shamelessly into the aspirations, foibles and failures of Middle America, using the second-person singular … so that the voice gathers an inclusiveness about it and the satirist avoids being hoist by his own petard … [A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck] is almost like an emblem book, a diamond etched series of satiric plates with the sonnets as sharp morals, the acuity given by the language which ranges from a streetwise ‘hey, dude’ argot to po-faced definition. With its adventurous inventions, this is a marvellous piece of work." – N.S. Thompson