88 pp, ISBN 978-1-904130-30-7, £10.99 / $22.00 (Hardback), US Publication April 2008 / UK publication July 2008

88 pp, Paperback ISBN 978-1-904130-28-4, £7.99 / $15.95 (Paperback), US Publication, April 2008 / UK publication June 2008

Post-free for on-line credit/debit card orders

I wish to order this book

 

A note about A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck Set up rather like an encyclopedia, and containing urgent information about pretty much everything – from the Big Bang to the second shooter on the grassy knoll – Greg Williamson’s A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck is a collection of sonnets unlike any other.    The main character, an unnamed Everyman – a salesman, a poet, a conspiracy wonk, “the last man left alive” – a (somewhat) loveable loser, gets knocked off in the ninth line of every entry and is thereby condemned to being “old-fashioned, out of step, passé” for the duration.    Though full of science, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck is anything but forbidding, and though full of dead people, and inescapably dark, it also manages, somehow, to be hilariously funny.    The award-winning author of The Silent Partner and Errors in the Script is at the top of his game in this wildly inventive, formally spectacular and hugely accomplished book.

A note on Greg Williamson Greg Williamson grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. His first book, The Silent Partner, was published by Storyline Press and won the Nicholas Roerich Prize in 1995. His second book, Errors in the Script, was published by Overlook Press in 2001 and was runner-up for the NYC Poets’ Prize. He has received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. He teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Praise for A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck “Anyone who’s read Greg Williamson’s previous books has been necessarily astonished by this poet’s intellectual scope, wicked humor and truly stunning formal virtuosity. His books, The Silent Partner and Errors In The Script have placed him at the lead of younger poets writing in America today. But apparently that’s not good enough for him. In his wildly ambitious and satisfying new collection, A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, Williamson literally takes on the universe – the sun, moon, stars, the great unknowns of space, evolution, procreation – you name it. This poet’s got an opinion. And in a sonnet sequence no less! But these aren’t in any way your grandma’s sonnets – these are contemporary rhythms that feel utterly relevant while reminding us that music is still the pulse-quickening essence of poetry. What an extraordinary accomplishment this book is. In case you were wondering, the bar has definitely been raised.” – Erin Belieu “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. Like the range of his subjects, his diction winds, bends, lurches, and leaps from the scientific (‘thermohaline,’ ‘foraminifers,’ ‘isobars’), to the accurate but fanciful (‘Snood, Shako, Tam-o-shanter, Shriner fez’), to the invented (‘enrichum lawyericulum,’ ‘golfonaut,’ ‘blingblingitis’). The poems amuse, impress, and finally dazzle us. Williamson may often seem drunk on language, but he is always sober in his thinking. He takes an ordinary phenomenon like water, or a hat, then finds an appropriate cliché (‘we’re all wet,’ ‘under your hat’) and plumbs both of them, expanding, opening them up, looking at them anew. Words are his materials, and he uses them like a master craftsman. Out of carbon he makes diamonds.” – Willard Spiegelman

From A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck   Time for John Hollander Time was, it wasn’t. “Then,” a singularity, Planck’s constant, quantum foam, the bottom quark – Better let them tell it – and, presto, we Had time. Thus, gnomons, Stonehenge, Harrison’s clock. Time had a future. Time was in! And you Could make it, save it, spend it, even un- derestimate it (time is money, son? Sure, but this ain’t the time your father knew) Until your limo slides up to the high Society grand ball, everyone’s there, Tripping the tarantella (“merci, with lime”), The old soft shoe, high hat, a final air Under the Milky Way, the signs, the sky- light’s stars, where everything is done                                                                   in time.       Space Space dons Time’s Delta pin. First date. Sparks fly. There’s chemistry, there’s calculus, there’s luck. And then (and there) there’s us, the loinsome fry Of good old Father Time and Mother Fuck, Their spacey, new-age offspring, have her face, His hands, cut from the same cloth, their heirloom. We’re graviton, Calabi-Yau. We’re Space And Time’s. We’re leg-, head-, elbow-, living room, Until one day there’s no room left of you, Down in the module in your last space suit, Doing some fieldwork in that dusty place – Wormholes, dark matter, phase – a firsthand view Under the Fox, the Swan, the Herdsman’s boot, The Works, where Time keeps keeping time                                                                               with Space.   ©