There's always another windmill.

by Ogden Nash, John Alcorn (Illustrator)

first edition First edition. Trade paperback. Little, Brown, Boston (1968) Alcorn, John Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight fraying along edges. xiii, 141 p. illus. 22 cm. Includes Illustrations.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry".

Reviews

[Judith Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given a book of Ogden Nash poems as a prize by my English teacher Mrs Edith Hillier, when I was eleven years old, and at school in a Kentish oasthouse, where our classrooms were round, and where by tradition John Wesley had once preached. I felt very grown up!

These poems are pleasantly amusing and chuckle-provoking, and best consumed one at a time, I found. Among my favourites were:

If There Were No England, Country Life Could Invent It
Roll On, Thou Deep and Dark Blue Syllables, Roll On
The Indignant Owl
Leaves from a Grandfather's Summer Journals and
The Solitary Huntsman (this last, reminiscent of some of Walter de la Mare's creepier poems!)

If you prefer your Ogden Nash more punchy, there's always what is possibly the shortest poem in the American English/English language (not in this collection, I hasten to add):

FLEAS

Adam
'Ad 'Em

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

High highs and low lows.
Loved "John Peel, Shake Hands with 37 Mamas"

[Chris Fellows · Rating 2 out of 5]

It might be just me. The 60s seem psychologically farther away than the 30s, and this book of late Ogden Nash is very much of the 60s. The schtick wears thin taken in book-length quantities, the topical references are omnipresent and dated, and the air of establishment New England is wearying to the 21st century foreign mind. Mine, at any rate.

There are a few poems I very much liked. One of them is 'Notes for the Chart in 306'. Another is the first of the 'Modest Meditations on the Here, the Heretofore, and the Hereafter', which could very well be Housman:

Drink deep, old friend, and deeply drown your sorrows,
Perhaps you'll be the first of humankind
For whom they'll not through many turbid morrrows
Rise bloated to the surface of the mind