Description

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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 & clich's, slang & swearing. Anti-proverbs butter all your parsnips.

About the Author

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Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably the Bloodaxe Staying Alive trilogy: Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, UK 2002/ Miramax, US 2003), Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011), along with Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012). His other anthologies (all these from Bloodaxe) include Earth Shattering: ecopoems (2007), The Hundred Years' War: modern war poems (2014), and three collaborations with 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). In 2012 Candlestick Press published his selection of Ten Poems About Sheep in its renowned pamphlet series. In 2015 he guest-edited a special international issue of the American literary journal Ploughshares, its first all-poetry issue in its 44-year history. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry from the Society of Authors in 1982 and was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995. He is a trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival, and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.