Complete Nonsense
About this book
I cannot give the Reasons,I only sing the Tunes:The sadness of the Seasons,The madness of the Moons.I cannot be didacticOr lucid but I canBe quite obscure and practic-Ally marzipan from I Cannot Give the Reasons"Nonsense," wrote Mervyn Peake, "can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It's magic." Peake (1911-68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses "glitter with divine lunacy", propelling the reader to places where malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across the sea by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live exclusively on sphagnum moss.Fully annotated with a detailed introduction, Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations from Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels. It reprints complete - for the first time and in colour - the words and images from Rhymes Without Reason (1944), and Peake's comic masterpiece Figures of Speech (1954). All the poems have been newly edited by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake's Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer.Cover Painting: Mervyn Peake, Sensitive, Seldom and Sad (1944)