Errors in the Script: Sewanee Writers Conference Series

Ranging from brief pantoum to 12 rhyming riddles with multiple-choice answers (each true), Williamson's second collection of rigorously formal poems explores such subjects as a mockingbird who sits upon a surveillance camera and whoops the sounds of car alarms, a frustrated newlywed looking for real estate online, and window-shopping at a suburban Virginia mall this last with giddy annotations and Beowulf-like marginalia. The centerpiece of the collection is a series of 25 ""double exposures"" (a form Williamson invented) made of two interlocking six-line poems, the lines barely overlapping like a zipper down the middle of the page. Each stands in for an imagined series of paired photographs, ranging from ""Girl Hugging Snowman with Broken Goddamn Radiator"" to ""Medical School Skeleton with Dominoes Pizza Man"" to ""Half Border Collie, Half Black Strip"": ""The dog is leaping, poised for midflight,/ An emblematic darkness swallowing/ A Frisbee. There he stays, suspended in/ The Present tense, where night keeps following."" Many of the other poems opt for banal juxtapositions of high and low that are not nearly as outr as the poet seems to think they are; the Road Runner, for example, is described as ""the plum d cuckoo."" But Williamson's line breaks can be arresting (""Not many trees survive our satellite/ Communities""), and underneath the pop references and formal bounds, the poet seeks the various blank fields where inscription occurs a blank sheet of paper, a life and finds that errors are ""genetically"" inevitable. They make this script entertaining and humane. (Apr.) Forecast: Williamson's 1995 debut, The Silent Partner, was matched with a Whiting Award and a teaching gig at Johns Hopkins. Fans of Glyn Maxwell or Anthony Hecht (who, along with a quadumvirate of other men John Hollander, Donald Justice, Mark Strand and Alan Shapiro provides a blurb) will find a lot to like here if they can find the book.