Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 51 pages
• Published by: Louisiana State University Press May 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0807125636
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0807125632
• Book Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Weighs: 6.7 ounces

From Booklist
The great but painstaking Taylor customarily publishes one collection per decade. So what is this book doing, coming out only four years after Understanding Fiction? Having fun, that's what. Each poem in it is an example of a four-line light verse form invented by British writer E. C. Bentley and labeled with his middle name. A clerihew's first line ends with a person's name; its second line rhymes, often outrageously, with the name; and the succeeding lines also rhyme. Taylor's clerihews play with the monickers of the British poets laureate, the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, suicidal poets, the original Christian disciples, literary critics and reviewers, and principal players in the Clinton sex scandals. A clerihew's second couplet supposedly delivers a joke, but often the funniest thing in one is its first rhyme. If "Harold Bloom /. . . crack of doom," "Judas Iscariot / missed the sweet chariot," and "Robert Southey / . . . azimuth. He" prove amusing, reading the whole book should be all smiles. Ray Olson

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews (Paperback) The poet admits "brief." So these candles are. But each extinguished by thumb and index moistened by an expert tongue. How I wish that the average poem in the Atlantic Monthly could offer the wit and verve and originality of the average line in this enjoyable collection.