A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck
Lindsay is in her early fifties, Williamson in his mid-forties, and my sense is that neither has the reputation he or she deserves...Williamson's meters and designs are anything but free. He's like one of those stage magicians who, before making an escape, affably requests that another chain be wrapped around his torso...A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck leaves a similar impression of a career being delineated...Readers now have enough material from both authors to envisage a possible future range and command of a life's work...sheer cleverness: there s an extraordinary amount of wit and wordplay- outrageous puns, fractured homilies, garbled quotations, double entendres- in his short book. A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck recalls those planetarium shows that, in their vertiginous final minutes, whirl the audience through the cosmos...To say that Williamson is one of the three or four contemporary American masters of light verse may be a less grand pronouncement than it sounds, given how few serious poets these days would aspire to the title. But it s accurate, even so, and Willamson's Freshness and facility are heartening to behold...Williamson's rhymes are likewise dexterous, with a number of unexpected combinations...and here and there he comes up with something so neatly preposterous that Byron might have been proud to claim it...Cleverness of this high-flying sort can transport a book of light verse quite some distance, but on its own probably would be insufficient to make A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck the success that it is. The book holds up so well, richly repaying rereading, because there's a somber, eerie iciness at its core...The cartoonlike aspects of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck reassure us that everything is all right. In the Land of Animation, you can fall of a towering cliff or be flattened by an anvil, sizzle in a bolt of lightning or be encased in a block of ice and no harm is done; nothing is more comic than indestructibility. And nothing s more tragic than perishability...Readers of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck- this, yes, marvelous book- are now and then disturbingly aware that behind its jokes is an apparition whose skeletal smile is no joke at all. --Brad Leithauser, The New York Review of Books