Gavin Ewart, one of Britain's finest and most original poets, is presented here in a half-century retrospective. His subjects various and his approach toothsomely scathing, he believes: "good light verse is better than bad heavy verse any day of the week." Consider one of his briefest poems, "The Lover Reflects: Afterwards" - "Perhaps I was greedy. I know I should be grateful/You wanted a snack and I wanted a plateful." An inventive technical master (creator of the "Ewart" form), he stalks his favorite prey--hypocrisy, love's foibles, the "pseuds"--with a razor-sharp wit. "There is iron in irony, although you smile," he writes in one poem: ". . . I have my language, you have yours/ a lower-archy is a hierarchy viewed from above."
