Greg Williamson is the author of four books of poetry: The Silent Partner (Storyline Press, 1995) Errors in the Script (The Overlook Press, 2001), A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck (Waywiser Press, 2008), The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True (Waywiser Press, 2015), and he is the co-editor of the anthology Jiggery Pokery (Waywiser Press, 2018).
The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True
with illustrations by Brian Bowes.
When Kirby the sneaky dog-genius steals the hole Arlo dug in the yard, social order begins to break down. The ants get lazy. The brook dries up. The dragonfly has engine trouble. Kirby faces grave, injurious peril in getting it back and restoring cosmic harmony. Reflecting upon the hole’s eerie influence, he contemplates spider webs, Newton, The Old West, Scottish history, Templars, the Roundtable Knights, the existence of dragons, and the nature of time, itself, on the way to devising his Theory of Something, The Downhole Effect.
The award-winning author of The Silent Partner, Errors in the Script, and A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck is once again at the top of his game in this wickedly inventive, dazzlingly written and uproariously funny book.
Brilliantly comic, pleasingly discursive, admirably dexterous, this narrative poem is a tour de force. –Kirkus (starred review)
“Greg Williamson can do anything. A 1,200-plus-line narrative poem? Child’s play. About a dog that filches another dog’s beloved hole, then returns it? You betcha. In rhyming couplets? Ayup. In The Hole Story Greg Williamson once again demonstrates that he is a writer as metrically and intellectually nimble, as witty, and as line-by-line delightful as we have – or might hope to have – in American poetry.” – Michael Griffith
“You may not think that you’ve been impatiently waiting to read about slinking Kirby and put-upon Arlo, two versifying mongrels, but I assure you that you have. It belongs with Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet and Eliot’s Practical Cats and de la Mare’s Peacock Pie and Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. Those fun-loving gentlemen would companionably move aside and make room, welcoming Williamson to their sparkly table. You should too.” – Brad Leithauser
Illustrator Brian Bowes
Brian Bowes received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, California. Currently he is enrolled in the Hartford University MFA in Illustration program and scheduled to graduate in 2016. He has illustrated numerous books, which can be found in bookstores, and in university libraries around the world, as well as in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the United States Library of Congress. Watch a cool demonstration of the illustration process for The Hole Story in this You Tube video.
Jiggery Pokery Semicentennial
edited by Daniel Grove & Greg Williamson
It is 50 years since Atheneum published Anthony Hecht and John Hollander’s Jiggery-Pokery, a compendium of verses known as double dactyls. The double dactyl was the invention of Hecht and Paul Pascal, and is was aptly described on the jacket of Jiggery-Pokery as a devilish amalgam of rhyme, meter, name-dropping and pure nonsense. It caught on, too, just as the limerick and the clerihew had caught on, and has been testing the mettle of many a poet — and not a few aspiring poets — ever since. To celebrate Jiggery-Pokery‘s half-century, Waywiser is delighted to be publishing Jiggery-Pokery Semicentennial, a wholly new compendium expertly edited by Dan Groves and Greg Williamson. The volume is dedicated to the memories of Hecht and Hollander, and it comes with a splendid introduction by Willard Spiegelman, Hughes Professor emeritus at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and a regular contributor to the Leisure & Arts pages of The Wall Street Journal. Spiegelman’s most recent books are Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (2016) and If You See Something, Say Something: A Writer Looks at Art (2016). The volume also comes complete with a cover by the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser, a singularly appropriate choice since Glaser (still going strong at the age of 88) designed the cover for and also illustrated the original Hecht-Hollander volume.
A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck
Set up rather like an encyclopedia, and containing urgent information about pretty much everything – from the Big Bang to the second shooter on the grassy knoll – Greg Williamson’s A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck is a collection of sonnets unlike any other.
The main character, an unnamed Everyman – a salesman, a poet, a conspiracy wonk, “the last man left alive” – a (somewhat) loveable loser, gets knocked off in the ninth line of every entry and is thereby condemned to being “old-fashioned, out of step, passé” for the duration.
Though full of science, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck is anything but forbidding, and though full of dead people, and inescapably dark, it also manages, somehow, to be hilariously funny.
The award-winning author of The Silent Partner and Errors in the Script is at the top of his game in this wildly inventive, formally spectacular and hugely accomplished book.
Errors In the Script
Runner-up for the NYC Poet’s Prize, Greg’s second book of poetry (2001) earned him great praise for the invention of a series of poems called “Double Exposures.”
The Double Exposure is a form in which one poem can be read three different ways: solely the standard type, solely the bold type in alternating lines, or the combination of the two.
In an interview with Smartish Pace, Greg described the form this way:
When I’d first written a few Double Exposures, I was reminded by a friend that I’d floated an idea like it back in school. I liked the notion of having this text on the page that interleaves and changes depending on how you look at it. But I never thought of an unhokey way of doing it. One day, years later, I was thinking about the effects of this photographic double exposure, and I thought I’d give it a shot. I figured it ought to be about 3×5, and I wanted the third, combined reading to bring the other two together into a complexified, and generally darker, coexistence.
Read a sampling of Double Exposures at PoetryFoundation.org
The Silent Partner
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
“Greg Williamson’s poetry is remarkable for its clarity and charged findings….The Silent Partner is a stunner of a first book. Read it.” –Wyatt Prunty
“Greg Williamson’s excellent first book is the work of a meditative mind, and at the same time of a sharp eye devoted to concrete reality. He is concerned with such matters as the desire to shape the world, the risk of fraud and imposition in all shaping, and the fugitive nature of all orderings. His mind and eye combine splendidly to realize these themes…it seems to me that Williamson has every gift, technical or imaginative, and that the appearance of The Silent Partner is a real event.” –Richard Wilbur