I cannot give the Reasons, I only sing the Tunes: The sadness of the Seasons, The madness of the Moons. I cannot be didactic Or lucid but I can Be quite obscure and practic- Ally marzipan from I Cannot Give the Reasons "Nonsense," wrote Mervyn Peake, "can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It's magic." Peake (1911-68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses "glitter with divine lunacy", propelling the reader to places where malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across the sea by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live exclusively on sphagnum moss. Fully annotated with a detailed introduction, Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations from Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels. It reprints complete - for the first time and in colour - the words and images from Rhymes Without Reason (1944), and Peake's comic masterpiece Figures of Speech (1954). All the poems have been newly edited by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake's Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer. Cover Painting: Mervyn Peake, Sensitive, Seldom and Sad (1944)
Author
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology. Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ("Letters from a Lost Uncle"), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero. Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.
