Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Peculiar
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€16.99
This lively anthology brings together two kinds of funny: humorous poems that make you laugh or smile (funny ha-ha), and strange, surreal, witty or plain weird poems (funny peculiar). There has always been a tradition of comic and curious verse in English poetry, but in contemporary poetry the peculiar has really come into its own, as this surprising selection shows, with poems on: 1 l The Opposite Sex: Love, desire, romance, sex, men & women, adultery & celibacy. 2 l Matters of Life & Death: Life, growing up, growing old, bums & hips, swearing & shaving, amnesia & the end. 3 l Nowt So Funny as Folk: Shops & wheelbarrows, poets & artists, jobs and jobless, war & oppression. 4 l Peculiar Places: Skunks in America, England & Scotland, curries & selfies, Armageddon & colonic irrigation. 5 l Sounds True: Lies & beliefs, Popes & poodles, fire alarms, tennis, rain, static, and Country & Western music. 6 l Animal Magic: Goats, sheep, chickens, yaks, cows, bison, horses, herons, chameleons & crustaceans. And people... 7 l Words & Worse: Adages & proverbs, curses & clichés, slang & swearing. Anti-proverbs butter all your parsnips.
Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably those in Bloodaxe's Staying Alive anthology series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011), and Staying Human (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and three collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds (2008), and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets (2008) and In Person: World Poets (2017). He has published two novels, The End of My Tether (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World (2005). He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books, and in 2018 was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He also guest-edited a transatlantic all-poetry issue of the American literary journal Ploughshares, the first such issue in its 43-year history. He lives in the Tarset Valley of Northumberland, England.