Full Description
John Heath-Stubbs' new collection is wise, wry and unexpected. In his eighty-sixth year, the poet commands his medium with a virtuoso's easy lightness of touch, returning to lifelong preoccupations with a fresh and intimate attention. His responsiveness to the natural world, to birds in particular, is deepened by a lifetime's observation and listening, and invigorated by delight in nature's unfailing newness. Genial and tolerant, this collection mixes an inevitable nostalgia with light-heartedness; satirical squibs are balanced by moments of elegiac beauty. The grace of the moment is highlighted by an awareness of the continuities of natural and human history. C.H. Sisson called Heath-Stubbs 'a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability' (a reference to the poet's blindness); like Johnson in his later years, Heath-Stubbs' learned urbanity is enormously generous and beguilingly gruff.
Contents
Table of Contents The Day that Pigs Learned to Fly Cat and Dog A Mnemonic Penge - Moral Standards Vindicated The Tadpoles Poem Intended to be Inscribed on a Manhole Cover in a London Pavement Pollen Cephalopods Fitzroy Madame Butterfly The Tuatera Speaks Gadarenes Migrants Cat Talk The Frog and the Scorpion Homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs Brock An Oxford Tortoise The Duckatrice of Netley Abbey I Am a Roman Careme and the Marquis de Cussy Chelone The Clock Stopped Mushroom Universities Omar Khayyam The World's My Oyster The Pompadour Chatterer An Ibis at Blackpool A Tufted Duck The Nightingale's Ode to John Keats On Christmas Day Poem for Easter St Godric of Finchale (1069-1170) A Bit of a Tall Order Pandora's Box Devizes In the Porcelain Factory Edward Fitzgerald meets Mother Goose and Both Become Politically Committed Old Mother Hubbard Little Miss Muffet Tom, Tom the Piper's Son Little Bo Peep The Queen of Hearts Jack Sprat and his Wife Baa Baa Black Sheep Pussy's in the Well Little Jack Horner
