Thursday, February 1, 2018

And a wit that was both wry and rather perversical

I did enjoy these review in The Economist, April 9th, 2005. Reviewing Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse by Douglas M. Parker. The review is in the form of verses in the Ogden styles.
How odd of Og to have no dog—
Well, he did once have a terrier
To make the household merrier.
But mostly he was pugless,
We're told by Parker—not Dorothy but Douglas.
Actually, we're not:
This aperçu
May not be true.

He had a fairly quiet life,
Two lovely girls, a lovely wife,
And lived a while in Baltimore,
Which wasn't all his fault, for sure.

He didn't go in much for travel:
The thought of flight made him unravel.
So, no, he never saw Majorca,
But wrote a lot for the New Yorker.

He was a most delightful man, with many a charming idiosyncrasy—
And his great-great-great-uncle, a general, gave his name to Nashville in Tennasy.
But, more to the point, he had a gift for writing a versicle,
And a wit that was both wry and rather perversical.
Only with cocktails did he like to make a splash,
That Ogden Nash.

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