Errors in the Script
by Greg Williamson

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." In this new volume, 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 contains three poems in one.

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.

"No recent book I know displays the ingenuity of Errors in the Script, none in which colloquial diction and elaborate rhyme scheme, relaxed disclosure and metrical order enact such a pleasing mutuality of purpose. Greg Williamson's poems, in their eccentricity, display a kind of truth, a wittiness that does not fail to dazzle and delight.
— Mark Strand

"I know of no one among the young who writes with more wit and invention and vigor and accuracy of observation than Greg Williamson ... This poet seems to take pride as well as delight in setting himself problems to solve and then solving them. Verse turns to poetry before one's eyes— and in one's ear. Highly recommended."
— Donald Justice

"Greg Williamson's Errors in the Script is a brilliant, masterful, hilarious book of poems that disquiets even as it hugely entertains. In poem after memorable poem, in an astonishing variety of forms, idioms, styles and subjects, Williamson explores, laments and celebrates the inherent doubleness of art, of language, of our relation to the world within us and around us. I know of few poets so exquisitely attuned to the way imagination both recreates experience and displaces it, to the way metaphor both discovers truth and invents it, to the way the very words with which we write or speak, and which make us who we are, both serve and elude our intentions, both make and unmake meaning. In Greg Williamson's accomplished hands, the unavoidable 'errors in the script' have helped produce a flawless book."
— Alan Shapiro

"Errors in the Script is a deeply impressive book ... Its triumph is a brilliant and totally original sequence of poems called 'double exposures,' deploying a technical device which totally transcends gimmickry, and, itself a fecund metaphor, allows the poems themselves to raise fascinating questions about knowledge, memory, and their own stability and truth.
— John Hollander