PEGASUS DESCENDING: A Book of the Best Bad Verse

This Compleat Hod-ful of Clinkers from poetic disasters past and present will bring on either monumental wortschmerz or helpless merriment. With all due -- and what they have wrought deserves the due -- to Lewis &Lee's The Stuffed Owl (the touchstone anthology of dreadful verse) and Walser's barbed bouquet of poesy, Nematodes in My Garden of Verse, and others, the editors launch their compendium with a Drydenesque colloquy. Then on, and lo among the disaster-prone lays is Whitman (""Unfolding out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded, and is always to come unfolded"") and Hardy (""Recall it you? -- Say you do"") and poor Emily Dickinson, whose dash-ed spasms are done to a turn later on. But there are lesser lights who come into their own in further sections, the foremost being a Dundee Swan who sang of railroads and bridges, and the ""Sweet Singer of Michigan,"" Mrs. Julia Moore (""To the Grand Rapids Cricket Club""). There are also farflung items such as ""A Soldier's Tribute to the YMCA"" and a contemporary ode to the I.U.D. But add your own gems to the editors' string of punctured pearls.