Reviews

100 Poems on the Underground by Gerard Benson, Gerard Benson, Cicely Herbert, Judith Chernaik

sloatsj's review

3.0

I picked this up at a library clearance sale. I admire public projects like this that slip literature into everyday life, and one of the charms of this collection is the poems have to be reasonably brief to fit onto the placards on the London Tube. Still, some of the poems are really tired. For example, if I EVER have to read the WC Williams poem about those plums again I might scream. Blake’s “Sick Rose” is also here, as is his “Tyger,” along with “Ozymandias,” Donne’s “Holy Sonnet,” and some other perennials. For that reason, this isn’t really a book for the hardcore poetry fan who’s going to know (and possibly already have at hand) most of these, as worthwhile as they are. My favorites were the surprises I’d never read before, like Derek Walcott’s “Midsummer, Tobago,” and the funny portrait “Sergeant Brown’s Parrot,” which surely was written for children.

Here’s the shortest poem in the book, and I imagine I’d enjoy reading it on my morning commute:

Dreams

Here we are all, by day; by night we’re hurled
By dreams, each one, into a several world.

Robert Herrick