The Curse of the Vampire's Socks and Other Doggerel
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Cover Story
The illustration on our cover is taken from Stories for Children by Oscar Wilde, illustrated by P J Lynch, 0 7500 0302 2, £10.00 (see Fairy Tale Favourites). The book is published by Simon & Schuster and we're grateful to them for help in using this illustration.
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The Curse of the Vampire's Socks and Other Doggerel
Michael Foreman
The title poem in this collection of ingenious verses describes how a vengeful dead vampire tortures a town by suspending his putrifying socks in the air above it, until a farmer's wife lifts the curse by converting the socks into mouthwatering cheese. This devoutly coprophilous keynote comes through loudly in two or three other odes to the joys of mucky-mindedness, but there are also episodes of delightfully pure surrealism, an impressive feat of wordplay in 'An Attempt on the World Rhyming Championship Record', and a serious vein of restrained green wrath running through poems like 'The New Mina' and 'Extinction Day'. A thoroughly enjoyable fusion of skilled verbal structuring and anarchic imagination.
