A Splendid Collection
A review of The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse. Link. Excerpts:
The lavish new Everyman Book Of Nonsense Verse is an exemplary anthology, covering the ground with thoroughness while also aggravating and enlarging the definition of its subject. All the canonical nonsense-masters are present--Lear, Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, Mervyn Peake--as well as cheerful moderns like Matthew Sweeney and Roger McGough. But it is in the inclusion of Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor Of Ice Cream" and Ted Hughes' "Wodwo" that the editor, Louise Guinness, has distinguished herself. . .
No one does just nonsense: That would be inhuman. It works best as a hobby, a sideline. Lear was a painter, Carroll a clergyman and mathematician. Mervyn Peake, with all the mental tonnage of his Gormenghast novels installed and pressurized in his head, seems to have fired out brilliant squibs of nonsense for relief: "Of fallow-land and pasture / And skies both pink and grey, / I made my statement last year / And have no more to say." Chesterton found the production of nonsense verse to be--literally--laughably easy: "To publish a book of my nonsense verses," he wrote to his fiancé, "seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to watch me smoke a cigarette." And Stevens said of "The Emperor Of Ice Cream": "I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. This poem is an instance of letting myself go."
We've already ordered our copy.
