 Although all of the poems take their turns diving and rolling like the "state-of the-art stunt kites" at the opening of "Kites at the Washington Monument," the book's most stunning achievement—remarked on and praised by reviews in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among other major publications—is a formal invention that embodies the sort of double-vision that fascinates Williamson.
The "Double Exposures" of the book's central section are short poems meant to represent a roll of double-exposed film, two series of twenty-six images overlapping in the same space. Each poem is composed of two short columns of couplets, and each column describes one of the two images. The amazing thing about these poems is that we can also read the columns together, across from one column to the next in quatrains. The double use of each line gives the poet access to impressive effects. For example, see "Girl Hugging Snowman with Broken Goddamn Radiator," which alludes playfully to Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man":
The way that the word "this" in the left column's third line switches from adjective to pronoun as we interleave the poem's columns produces a splendid joke—"Maybe it's wrong to read this/And Wallace Stevens"—an unexpected self-referential deflation. But at the end of the poem when the word "Which" in the final line shifts from referring to a radiator to the couple's vows, the effect is sobering: as serious as a stroke.
Though Williamson says there's no right way to write a double-exposure, for each of his pieces he began with a sketch of the imaginary double-exposed snapshots ("usually just with stick figures," he says). From there, the poem could grow in any direction: "Sometimes, I might have the two lines at the end—one line on either side—and then be able to write more or less one whole column, but be stuck on the other half. . . . Sometimes I'd work from the beginning and end toward the middle. I tried to get new ways for the syntax to work over the lines, but it's pretty much just like writing a sonnet or other short form, except for that 'estuary' down the middle, where the lines have to go both ways."
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"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
"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
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