Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
Hit Parade
By Clive James
The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse
chosen by Geoffrey Grigson
Oxford University Press, 454 pp., $22.50
There are several glaring omissions, but otherwise The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse is one of the best anthologies by the best modern anthologist. Geoffrey Grigson has always had a way of picking plums. His famous anthology of the Thirties, New Verse, remains a good introduction to the póetry of that time. He has continued making anthologies ever since. Some of them are anthologies of prose, others are chrestomathies of everything interesting from a given period, but they are all useful. A good anthology gives the reader the sense that he has stumbled on new outcrops of high-grade ore, even in poets whose work he thought he knew. The latest of Grigson's efforts fulfills that condition pretty well.
Review, 3086 words
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