Click below to read an extract (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)

Extract

Download / View (uploaded 16 September 2008)

Synopsis

A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck by Greg Williamson

‘The sonnet in English, which has changed only incrementally since Wyatt passed off Petrarch’s sonnets as his own, metamorphoses further with Greg Williamson’s brilliant inventions. I imagine a time when his particular form of the little song may even take on his name and be added to the distinguished list: the Petrarchan sonnet, the Shakespearean sonnet, the Miltonic sonnet, the Williamsonnet. I mean it. And this sequence deserves to take its place with the best.’ — Mark Jarman

‘Who ever would have thought that so many sonnets could still be so much fun? From birth to death, from the self to the cosmos, Greg Williamson's energetic sequence takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the external and internal universe. Along the way he updates and invigorates the form of the sonnet itself….The poems amuse, impress, and finally dazzle us. Williamson may often seem drunk on language, but he is always sober in his thinking. Words are his materials, and he uses them like a master craftsman. Out of carbon he makes diamonds.’ — Willard Spiegelman

Greg Williamson was born in 1964 and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins Universities, and is the author of two collections of poetry, The Silent Partner (Story Line Press, 1995) and Errors in the Script (Sewanee Writers' Series/The Overlook Press, 2001). Williamson's poetry has earned him the Nathan Haskell Dole Prize, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, a John Atherton Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and divides his time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Duluth, Georgia.

Reviews of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck

	11 September 2008
A Marvellous piece of Wirk
Reviewer: N S Thompson Publication: Times Literary Supplement
... The result is almost like an emblem book, a diamond-etched series of satiric plates with the sonnets as sharp morals, the acuity given by the language which ranges from a streetwise, "hey, dude" argot to po faced definition. with its adventurous intentions this is a marvellous piece of work. N S Thompson

Have you read A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck by Greg Williamson? - Add your own review