Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008

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X. J. Kennedys well-known travels between the realms of the comic and the serious qualify him for dual citizenship in the world of poetry. Here, the playful is on full display in verse not just light but bright and delightful.Billy Collins

Peeping Toms Cabin is the first full-length collection of light verse for adults composed by one of Americas most celebrated poets. An uncompromising formalist, Kennedy uses a broad range of longstanding poetic forms, including limerick, nursery rhyme, ballad, rhymed epitaph, and clerihew. This collection includes many poems previously published in poetry and popular journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Poetry. These poems honor and skewer all classes of citizen, regardless of their revered place in society. Parents, lovers, poetry critics, students, and especially notable literary figures receive Kennedys astute comic attention.

To Someone Who Insisted I Look Up Someone

I rang them up while touring Timbuktu,
Those bosom chums to whom youre known as Who

X. J. Kennedy has published six collections of verse, including Nude Descending a Staircase, which received the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets. His newest collection, The Lords of Misrule, received the 2004 Poets Prize. Kennedy has also authored eighteen childrens books and several textbooks on fiction and poetry. Other recognitions include the Los Angeles Book Award for Poetry, the Aiken-Taylor Award, and Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships. Kennedy was also given the first Michael Braude Award for light verse by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

From Publishers WeeklyAccompanying Kennedy's forthcoming selected (serious) poems, this agreeably cantankerous, occasionally laugh-out-loud-funny volume gathers brief parodies, barbed rhymes, naughty couplets and other assorted not-so-serious verse, dating (despite the title) from 1956 to the present. Kennedy serves up, among other poems, 46 limericks, 19 clerihews, assorted off-color jokes, rewritten popular songs from the pre-rock era (Suburban lawns with moles, / Things full of holes/ Remind me of you) and Mary Had a Little Lamb rewritten in the style of Sylvia Plath. Kennedy (The Lords of Misrule) also offers ghastly brats (poems too grisly for, but otherwise suited to, his three collections of children's verse) and a portrait of Sigmund Freud as Santa Claus. The volume seems less substantial than most collections of light verse (perhaps because Kennedy's greatest wits have been relegated to a companion volume); some of the jokes about sex and drink sound dated. Yet this lighter side of Kennedy should please fans of John Updike's verse or of the line of mid-century upscale rhyming--from Cole Porter to the New Yorker--to which most of these poems belong. (Sept.)

Author Bio

X.J. Kennedy has published eight previous collections of poetry; nineteen children's books, including Brats and Exploding Gravy; and one novel, The Owlstone Crown. His textbooks have been taught to more than four million students. He was the first recipient of the Michael Braude award for light verse by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.