THE SUNKEN RESTAURANT AND OTHER VERSE

A collection of satirical poetry that sends up current events, cultural oddities, and the misdeeds of President Ronald Reagan.

Taylor, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University, wrote and recited most of these poems for the Signatures show on Cleveland’s WVIZ public television station from 1982 to 1984, presenting news of the day in a breezy style. This hodgepodge includes items of purely local importance, including the title poem, which riffs on a floating restaurant that sank in the Cuyahoga River: “Gourmets won't flock for a night on the town / To that mooring so damp and so foggy. / You can’t serve good food on a boat that’s gone down; / The french fries get terribly soggy.” More often, Taylor explores broader national and international issues, with a generally disapproving focus on Reagan administration policies. These include an episode connected to the Iran-Contra scandal when National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane secretly took a chocolate cake to Iran: “The President wanted the hostages freed / And he hoped that some arms he could barter, / So he said to McFarlane ‘Go see what they need. / Say I’m nicer than President Carter.’ ” There are also poems on random topics ranging from academic controversies over the “Lucy” hominid fossils to a sperm bank supplied by Nobel Prize winners: “Should not we rather try to find / More people who are good and kind?” Piquant black-and-white line drawings by the author’s daughter Camilla add visual spice to the text. For the most part, Taylor’s verse is pleasantly accessible, with lively meters and inventive rhymes; in an example of the latter, while spoofing U.S. military aid to El Salvador, he writes, “And if your strength should start to flag you are / Facing a new Nicaragua.” However, poetry isn’t the best literary form for addressing complex and much-disputed policy questions, such as the safety of nuclear power, and Taylor’s highly opinionated stanzas sometimes feel glibly one-sided.

A clever but often shallow volume of rhyming political commentary.