THE MIRACLE DIET

Supplemented with cartoons by Viv Quillin, this volume of light verse by the well-regarded British poet is full of goofy rhymes and larky meters all in the service of poems about weight-loss and food. Frank in her language (—boobs,— —bums,— and —willies—), Rumens rues the ordinary hazards of eating well: a reflection in the mirror, ill-fitting clothes, sagging flesh. Her satiric edge cuts to the quick in ditties about famine, anorexia and bulimia considered as surefire solutions to one’s anxiety about girth. To the tune of Paul McCartney’s —Yesterday,— she croons about man’s perennial love of hourglass figures and lets a cat narrate his own guide to tinned food (—Matt the Ombudscat—). After praying to see a jogger collapse, she ponders the false satisfactions of being thinner: —Life’s just the same— without your —bum to blame.— Rumens’s virtuosity reveals itself in a short anthology spoofing major poets as eaters and dieters: Willie Bunter Yeats sojourns in a health farm called —Inches Free—; —Basher— Kipling- Cake suggests that all dieters are —poofters—; and Willie Psycho Williams, suffering from a —food habit,— eats more than the plums on the table. More in the style of Nash (here parodied as —Hogden Gnash—) than the women’s magazine verse of Judith Viorst, Rumens’s easy and enjoyable poems will console literate dieters everywhere.