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| The Man Who Sees Everything Twice Playing with puns and double meanings, Greg Williamson publishes a rich new collection of poems for the Sewanee Writers' Series by Isaac Cates
At least his poems do. His second book, Errors in the Script, is full of dualities, puns, intentional contradictions, and multiple views of objects, people, and life. In Errors in the Script, readers will come across, among other subjects, a quadruple view of nature and metaphor in "The Dark Days"; a sesquipedalian security mirror in "Three-Sided, One-Way Mirror"; a series of five-answer verse riddles in "Riddles"; a dichotomous take on art and truth in "Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius"; and double vision-literal and figurative-in "Binocular Diplopia." In "Binocular Diplopia," the narrator of the poem is asked to read the eye chart at an opthalmological exam. When he asks the doctor which chart, the nurse says, "Uh oh." But for the narrator the diagnosis of double vision is good news because it makes sense of a lifelong series of small mistakes such as "missed shots, a lifetime of misreading,/Mixed signals . . . false moves, smashed thumbs from hitting/the wrong nail on the head"-and of a distant, indefinite feeling that something original has been lost. None of the double images the speaker sees is an illusion exactly; all are true "[i]f seeing's believing." And if the world spread before us might be a text for us to read, then the speaker sees "the uncorrected proof." |
Sewanee Writers' Series Publishes Twelfth Book
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Greg Williamson has double vision.
The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the March 2004 release of its twelfth book, Greg Williams's Boomtown. Boomtown is the sharp hip tale of New York City dot-commers after the Y2K panic has passed. Internet start-ups are thriving, the stock market is climbing, and the dawn of the new century is just a little too bright for its own good.