Hats Off: Poems and Drawings

click here for more details, find new or used items	Joyce Grenfell Used from £0.01 Pages: 96 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0719561523 Pub: John Murray Pub date: 2000-10-12 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 54000

Reader Reviews:

Don't judge this book by its cover (18/19 people found this helpful)

The presentation of this book is really excessively twee: an Easter yellow cover with a line drawing that looks as if it has been done in six different kinds of biro. The poem about the pixies on the back cover "a-laughin' in the sun" is pretty gruesome and must have deterred all but the most determined readers. All of which is a pity because this is in fact a delightful book and the compiler has performed a great service by getting these poems back into the world. Grenfell fans will recognise her characteristic voice and humour in the social observation poems which are like tiny distilled versions of her brilliant character monologues. But not everyone is a Grenfell fan. It does her memory no harm to remember that a cruelly accurate parody of the Grenfell style was created in the 50s with the the title: "I'm rather keen on life" (for details see the recent June Whitfield autobiography). I think though that even the Grenfellophobes will find work of interest here. I was particulary struck by the war poems, especially the ones about St James Park during wartime and the feelings associated with emerging from a shelter into a cold pre-dawn. They are exactly the sort of Second World War British poetry we should have had but didn't, relating the experience of life on the home front in simple and human terms. Unfortunately at the time mainsteam poetry was away being "difficult" and neo-romantic. The poems here deserve to be widely anthologised. So my advice would be to buy this book but to put the cover away somewhere safe where it is unlikely to be found by visiting friends. Then go away and learn the best of these life-enhancing verses by heart.

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