Everywhere at Once

Cover

William Greenway’s Everywhere at Once travels between muggy recollections of a Southern Baptist childhood, meditations on the otherworldly beauty of Wales, and commentary on life, death, and the revelry in between. In lines taut with bluesy musical precision, Greenway clearly demarcates the before and after, pivoting on his wife’s stroke and arduous recovery. “This is our new umbilicus, / like those childhood cans on a string,” Greenway declares in “Cells,” a poem that likens his beloved to “a preemie, struggling back / from your ‘fatal’ stroke / to be my wife again.” For every witty turn of phrase, a punch beyond the punch line stuns us with wisdom and transcendence. Whether we are witnessing “Feeding Time at the Fuel and Fuddle” or “The Path to Iskeroon,” the constant company of a wry conductor’s voice guides and provokes, paying tribute to the humble moments in life, and even the world “beyond / the reach of light and love and words.” In the title poem that opens William Greenway’s new collection, Everywhere at Once, he finds himself rattling around in “the psychic pinball / of karma.” And by the end of the book, we know just what he means. The poems bounce all over the place, emotionally and geographically, as comedy gives way to disaster and Wales is supplanted by Youngstown, Ohio. Whatever the circumstance, Greenway remains a friendly and resourceful companion in this sometimes unsettling journey. He can make jokes as dry as the martinis that lubricate his lines, or remind us of the consolation of “the lowly embraceable body” after his wife’s stroke and recovery. A poem like “Ophelia Writes Home,” a witty revisionist account that shifts the slaughter of that famous tragedy to domestic bliss, exemplifies Greenway’s genius for reconciliation, for the grace of happiness no matter what happens. We smile, we grieve, and we keep reading these surehanded and goodhearted poems.—Elton Glaser, author of Winter Amnesties and Pelican Tracks