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.
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.