Gavin Ewart, one of Britain’s finest and most original poets, is presented here in a half-century retrospective. His subjects various and his approach toothsomely scathing, he “good light verse is better than bad heavy verse any day of the week.” Consider one of his briefest poems, “The Lover Afterwards” – “Perhaps I was greedy. I know I should be grateful/You wanted a snack and I wanted a plateful.” An inventive technical master (creator of the “Ewart” form), he stalks his favorite prey––hypocrisy, love’s foibles, the “pseuds”––with a razor-sharp wit. “There is iron in irony, although you smile,” he writes in one “…I have my language, you have yours/ a lower-archy is a hierarchy viewed from above.”
