Okay, so I love poetic parodies, and I like Martin Gardner's collections of mathematical curiosities, and I really like poetic parodies that are mathematical (call it a too-early exposure to the Annotated Alice), so I thought I would adore this book.

I didn't.

Perhaps my poetic education was simply to dissimilar to Mr. Gardner's, or perhaps my standards in poetic parody have been raised too high with the wide availability of top-notch examples on the internet, but nearly all of these poems left me cold. I want a poetic parody to stand as a poem in its own right, and to comment on the poem it parodies (by way of something else that's worthy of comment.) Most of the poems in this book are simply slightly silly verses that happen to borrow a form and a few bits of diction from another poem, without having anything much to say.

And it doesn't help that most of the original poems leave me cold; maybe part of what would make one like the parodies is overexposure in youth to heavily mediocre and sentimental originals? (Which, thank heaven, one of the few advantages of a modern American education is that they no longer force you through bad 19th century poetry en masse.) ( )