A Line-o'-verse or Two

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About this book

Newspaper verse turns breakfast cereals, literary fashions and public alarms into subjects for Bert Leston Taylor's rhymes. Collected largely from the Chicago Tribune and Puck, these poems move between comic storytelling, parody and quieter scenes of family reading. The opening poem follows Ambrose, a monk whose fondness for drink collides with his religious discipline and a book promising that pain is only an idea. Its bouncing rhythms make a pointed joke of the claims he adopts.

Elsewhere, a spruce tree faces conversion into paper and fashionable novels, while a family divides over extravagantly named breakfast foods. Paired poems about the comet of May 1910 set fearful expectation beside the ordinary morning that follows. A father reading fairy tales with a child supplies a gentler mood. The collection offers readers a view of everyday tastes and enthusiasms through quick rhymes, repeated lines and playful exaggeration.