Good Stuff

[kayshapero]

A few days ago I finally took Vicky to buy her birthday present (her birthday is Feb 14), a bowler hat. Found a lovely hat store, which had some good ones - and also had a really nice top hat which is what she wound up picking. We made a stylish exit (well, she did) and walked right next door to find a really good used book store. So now I have a copy of the complete verses of Rudyard Kipling, something I've wanted for some time, also an interesting little book entitled Nematodes in my Garden of Verse, by Richard Walser. It's a collection of poems from North Carolina newspapers etc., mostly in the mid 1800s, and ranges from the sort of thing Mark Twain burlesqued so wonderfully in Huckleberry Finn, to stuff which is actually quite good in its own right. Through things difficult to describe - the book is out in the car at the moment but I'll have to bring it in sometime later and quote a few. Right now my favorite is "Ode to a Ditch", a lovely example of what happens when you ignore a good wordsmith... or in this case a newspaper's scathing report on a disgustingly untreated open sewer in the town.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I bought the complete Kipling years and years ago, and through reading it many times, hit on poems I like that aren't the ones everyone knows. "The Hymn of Breaking Strain" is excellent, and has a very sfnal quality to it.