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.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.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, NYRB "His verse is gripping and full of black comedy, sure to give fans of his work more of what they have come to love." The Midwest Book Review "Williamson's buoyant voice is constant - we're given a blast of amiable poetry on each page... playful and quick-witted." Poetry Poetry. 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, passe" 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.
