The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True

Poetry. When Kirby the sneaky, dog-genius steals the hole Arlo dug in the yard, social order begins to break down. The ants get lazy. The brook dries up. The dragonfly has engine trouble. Kirby faces grave, injurious peril in getting it back and restoring cosmic harmony. Reflecting upon the hole's eerie influence, he contemplates spider webs, Newton, The Old West, Scottish history, Templars, the Roundtable Knights, the existence of dragons, and the nature of time, itself, on the way to devising his Theory of Something, The Downhole Effect. The award-winning author of The Silent Partner, Errors in the Script, and A MOST MARVELOUS PIECE OF LUCK is once again at the top of his game in this wickedly inventive, dazzlingly written and uproariously funny book.

"Greg Williamson can do anything. A 1,200-plus-line narrative poem? Child's play. About a dog that filches another dog's beloved hole, then returns it? You betcha. In rhyming couplets? Ayup. That manages, improbably, to morph into a profound and startling meditation on genealogy, Chaucer, and the nature of space and time, among other subjects? Absolutely. And all this he manages while showing off an astonishing combinatorial agility and playfulness, laying waste any distinction between so-called high and low diction, so-called high and low ideas. In THE HOLE STORY Greg Williamson once again demonstrates that he is a writer as metrically and intellectually nimble, as witty, and as line-by-line delightful as we have—or might hope to have—in American poetry."—Michael Griffith

"You may not think that you've been impatiently waiting to read about slinking Kirby and put-upon Arlo, two versifying mongrels, but I assure you that you have. It has been ages since a children's poem showed this degree of polish, of unforced and uncloying smarts and brio and wit. The rhymes are so nimble! The pratfalls so spectacularly poised! THE HOLE STORY is a true book-lover's book—and an easy-to-swallow antidote to all those cyber-poisons that imperil our children. It's long and loopy and cartoony and somehow concludes with a gorgeous, noble Hymn to a Suburban Afternoon. It belongs with Jarrell's 'The Bat-Poet' and Eliot's 'Practical Cats' and de la Mare's 'Peacock Pie' and Stevenson's 'Child's Garden of Verses.' Those fun-loving gentlemen would companionably move aside and make room, welcoming Williamson to their sparkly table. You should too."—Brad Leithauser