Why Write Haiku? and Other Words on Words is about the World of words. Anyone who has a serious interest in words and their place in the World should find it to be of interest. See details of CONTENT for more information.;CONTENT; Section One: SIX HONEST SERVING MEN. Questions posed include not only that of the title essay, but 'Who ere the Georgians?' and 'What is an Essay?':Section Two: TRIOLET. This one IS for the poets. It succintly tells the reader just what the selected types of poetry (from Ballads to Vers Libre) are, and how to tackle them. ;Section Three: LITERARY TERMS: Brief definitions of terms used in prose and poetry, from Accentual Verse to Zeitgeist. ;Section Four: WORDS ON WORDS: A playful look at the derivation, use and misuse of our language with words as diverse as 'sleazy' and 'egregious' ;Section Five: LIVING WORDS: Seventeen essays on literary biography. See the 'Reviews' section for more detail. ;[There is also an index of the 242 writers named in the text, from Dannie Abse to Oleg Zamyatin]
Industry Reviews
Review of LIVING WORDS by Robert Nisbet (part two included in this volume).;Literary biography can be on times be a parlous business. It is an unavoidable fact that it is usually written by scholars, professionals with reputations to make and therefore with a vested interest in saying something which will break new ground, will analyse in depth - will, if they are not careful, take some of the simple joy out of reading.;Hence some of the pleasure I gained from reading this book. It is the work of a man who freely admits to being a non academic. In the strict sense of the word, he is an amateur (in other words, a lover of books and reading) and not a hard-nosed professional. And hence his book emanates a delightful sense of being a journey through literature's many paths and by-ways, in the company of a guide who is informed, well-read (extremely well-read, in fact) and who best of all finds a genuine delight in his reading - as well as having the capacity to communicate his enjoyment freshly.;Living Words is published in Romania for the use of students working for the English Language baccalaureate. The first part consists of thirteen short critical commentarires on set texts, and in each of them the writer deftly and succintly takes on just one academic nail and hits it neatly on the head; the ironic voice in Huck Finn, the city as protagonist in Bleak House and many more.;But the body of the book lies in the second half, its nineteen essays. They were originally written for Writers' Monthly and each one takes one dimension of the writing craft (war, the Welsh experience, the value of a sympathetic spouse, writing from experience, and so forth) and looks at three or more experiences in the history of literature.;We learn, for example, of the literary and marital careers of Mrs. Gaskell, Katherine Mansfield, Edwin Muir and George Orwell. We learn of the sense of place, as it affected Jack London, J.G. Ballard, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Virginia Woolf and A.E. Houseman. It will be a very well-informed reader indeed who is not picking up little nuggets of information on almost every page.;It is a long time since I read a book which afforded me such an easy wealth of relaxation and enjoyment. It really is an absorbing read and can be strongly recommended to anyone interested in the writing craft.
