Ah, gentle reader. As the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category simply labeled “Funny” and as I laid my hands upon this volume of Ogden Nash poetry which I bought in 2021, I thought it would do. After all, I have found Nash amusing over the years. As I recount in my last book report on a Nash collection (I’m a Stranger Here Myself in 2019), I read a bunch of Ogden Nash poetry 15 years ago when I would sit and read the poems aloud to my toddlers as they played with blocks or whatever, trying to foster a love of reading, poetry, and/or silliness in them which lasted right up until they got smart phones.
At any rate, this is collection came out after Nash’s death, and it’s a bit…. Well, not jarring, but many of his best-known works came out in the period between the 1930s and early 1960s, so they always seemed to talk about a different time, a bit anachronistic and dealing with the pre-, during, and immediately post-World War II northeast. I mean, they weren’t Clarence Day, but they were closer to that era than to today.
Meanwhile, this book tackles and makes light of late 1960s America. The world of Dirty Harry, the Vietnam War, and whatnot. So it bridges a divide of sorts between a world my grandparents would have known and the world into which I was born. Odd.
Although I have to say that I probably draw more on Ogden Nash when I coin a word in one of my poems rather than drawing on some classic poet of antiquity.
So, “funny”? Well, it amused in spots as Nash does, but that’s about the best I can hope for out of a book.
So worth a read if you’re a Nash fan and maybe a good place to start if you’re not as you might find the topics a little less anachronistic if you’re of a certain age (that is, the age of someone who reads books instead of watching whatever short attention span app will arise on smart phones in the coming days).
Oh, and I do want to kvetch a little bit that I got this book in paperback (unlike the other volumes of Nash I own), and its spine cracked and the binding started giving way even though the book is but fifty-some years old. So maybe I will have to look for it in hardback somewhere as I might be becoming a Nash collector. Which is cheaper than collecting the car (so far).