The dual-purpose play on "proof" is the sort of pun that occurs again and again in Errors in the Script: a phrase that means two things at once, and which in its playful double-meaning implicates the whole world of our perceptions and our speech in an ominous duplicity. Williamson lets puns take his speakers unawares, as when one plays solitaire on a backyard deck and sees "exclusive clubs" of birds around a feeder, and a "spade/In the ground he calls a spade."

His narrators also enact puns. When asked to fold origami by his students, one lets an unfolded page be "a bed." "See," he says, "it's a sheet." When the students ask what he can make, the poet answers, "I make mistakes." By the end of "Origami," the first poem in the book, the blank page has been the image of many things, but it winds up wadded into that shape familiar to writers: the imitation snowball. The poem is an unsettling start for a collection of poems.

"I suppose that poem's first for its taking up the blank page, here at the beginning of the book, and wondering what to do with it," Williamson says, "But trope around long enough, and you're going to trope up something maybe you didn't want to look at, artistic failure and the little rented room of your own mortality not least."

But is every comparison a kind of error? Is a slip in our reading of the world merely the sign of an active imagination? Is poetry a business of continual near-mistaking? Robert Frost observed that "all metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it." In at least one sense, the errors that populate Williamson's book derive from Frost's observation.

In Williamson's poems any comparison, cleverness, or conceit, no matter how apt, explodes on itself when pushed too far. If the Muse appears to Williamson, she does so with her tongue in her cheek, and "getteth alle up in hys face." Williamson piles pun on pun, double-meaning on double-meaning, to see how tall his house of cards can be before it falls. Many poems in this collection are daring because they step like a tightrope-walker between a clever mind and a speaking heart, or between figure and all-too-stony ground. "The pater familias of English poetry is Geoffrey Chaucer," says Williamson, "and the greatest poet is William Shakespeare, and their jackets are made out of irony. The material of poetry is, foremost, the language itself, and that's one slippery eel."

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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.