Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)

i read this for a literature class and i just couldn't stop reading! i get chills and goosebumps with every page i read! 10/10, i reccomend reading this during the spooky season.

"Monster Verse" is a very interesting collection of poetry. Most are not your typical poems. Several of them are from well-knows myths and legends, e.g., Beowulf, The Odyssey, King Arthur, and Jason & the Argonauts. There are excerpts from Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Ovid.While I enjoyed a lot of the selections, I didn't absolutely adore many of the poems. James Weldon Johnson's "The White Witch" was probably my favorite. It had great narrative, was quite descriptive, and was clearly written by a man who fears sensuous women. Great fun. "The Bride of Frankenstein" was also a winner as Edward Field crafted a scary Halloween poem ("The Baron decided to mate the monster,/to breed him perhaps,/in the interest of pure science, his only god.") Pierre de Ronsard's "Invective Against Denise, A Witch" has great imagery and is quite scary.There were only a few I really didn't like. Thom Gunn's "Hitch-Hiker" reeks of pretentiousness and really doesn't make sense. Spenser's "The Quelling of the Blatant Beast" from The Faerie Queene was written more than 500 years ago and used too many obscure words. The selection from Robert Lowell's "The Mermaid" was a little too abstruse.All in all there are a lot of fun poems in this anthology. Some are very gruesome, many are frightening, and most will make you wonder where the poet's head was at when they wrote the poem. Recommended.

This is a great little book to keep in your knapsack and dip into. Though compact, it has most of the chestnuts you'd expect in an anthology of monstrous verse, from "The Kraken" to "Jabberwocky," from Grendel to the Grinch. There are also a lot of poets and monsters I'd never heard of before, which has made it something of a treasure trove, for me, at least, and a number of living or relatively modern poets, like A. E. Stallings, sit very well with the old masters. Well worth the price if you want to be amused, bemused, or other muse-like activities.

Love the size

As much as I have loved Everyman's books in the Classics series, I've been less enthusiastic about the smaller format poetry books, with some exceptions. Charles Johnson's outstanding translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is in this format, but I hate the cut down versions of the various poets. And most of the thematic collections fail to interest me in the least. For every collection that is interesting - like a great one on the villanelle (most of us know Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and E. A. Robinson's "The Home on the Hill," fewer Roethke's "The Waking" and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song", and a few others by Elizabeth Bishop and Ernest Dowson and Robert Frost) - there are ten I couldn't be bothered with. Most of the collections are bland, but you have to love a title like Monster Verse. And the poems manage to come up to the title. It is a remarkably diverse collection, some funny, some quirky, some familiar, many by poets I've never even heard of. Some of the poems are by writers you don't associate with poetry, like Neil Gaiman and Ishmael Reed, and some who are obvious in retrospect but that I didn't anticipate like Robert Browning and Edmund Spenser. There are low brow and low brow poems, new poems and classic poems, and poems for kids and poems for adults.This is, in short, a great collection. It is both a ton of fun and illuminating, with a splendid introduction by the editors Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust. And a heck of a lot more interesting than another collection of love poems or poems about fathers or cats.

It seems that we homo sapiens have forever been preoccupied with things that go bump in the night, and this collection of poems about the things that scare us is a definitive look at horror in poetry written throughout recorded history. This beautifully crafted little hardback book (4 ½” by 6 ½”) is a perfect take-along volume, fitting into pocket, backpack, or purse. A lush ribbon bookmark keeps the reader’s place and the creamy pages are a joy to read. Modern horror and dark fantasy authors Neil Gaiman and Stephen King open the volume with chilling little poems about the end of the world and the boogeyman, followed by poets new and old. Separated into sections entitled Aliens and Human Monsters/Witches, Wizards, Magicians, and Faerie Creatures/Bestiary, each of these poems is dark and entrancing. Some poets you are sure to recognize, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe Jorge Louis Borges, and Ted Hughes to name a few, who are joined by lesser known (to me, anyway) poets all writing about the scary things that lurk in the darkness just beyond our virtual campfires. Even the anonymous poet who penned Beowulf’s battle with the monstrous Grendel is included, as is the beloved Dr. Seuss. This is an unnerving journey though the history of odd and scary monsters, from Ovid to Homer to Lewis Carroll to Robert Frost and onward, all captured between the covers of this delightful little volume of poems about strange and dreadful creatures.