A Gaggle of Verses

Vonna Adrian

It's especially painful reading this particular collection of Doggerel so soon after Richard Howard's Untitled Subjects. Adrian touches on many of the same historical personages as does Howard, inviting comparison between them. Which is roughly akin to comparing a three- year-old's stick figure drawings to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

This is painful, horrible stuff. It might be salvageable were the rhyme scheme to be paired with an excellent sense of enjambment and rhythm a la Thomas Hardy, or even a strong sense of the organic a la Hopkins and his sprung rhythm. But this has neither, and most of these poems land not even with a thud, but with a kind of wet smack, on the pavement:

“Nature he loved, in verse he said it,
and yet to his discredit
he hurled the cook into the garden.

True, he begged Dame Nature's pardon,
Clasping his white impetuous head:
‘God! I forgot the violet bed!'”
(“Walter, That Savage Landor”)

“Painful” is an understatement. Avoid like the plague. (zero)