‘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 lead the reader into places where cause is cut free of effect and language takes on a giddy life of its own. Malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across an ocean by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live on sphagnum moss.
Fully annotated, with a detailed introduction, Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations previously published in Peake’s Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from other uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels.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, often from Peake’s manuscripts, by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake’s Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer. Peake wrote of the rare art that ‘glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense’: Complete Nonsense glitters with Peake’s benign and wayward imagination.

Cover painting: Mervyn Peake, ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ from Rhymes without Reason (1944) © the Mervyn Peake Estate. Cover design StephenRaw.com.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction by R.W. Maslen A Note on the Text References and Further Reading COMPLETE NONSENSE I Saw a Puffin The Song of Lien Tsung Railway Ditties Waddon Thornton Heath Norbury Streatham and Balham Green Park You Can Never Be Sure of Your Birron Beard of My Chin You Before Me Although I Love Him Practically Poetry Ode to a Bowler Raft Song of the Conger Eel The Dwarf of Battersea Thank God for a Tadpole About My Ebb and Flow-ziness A Fair Amount of Doziness Ancient Root O Ancient Root The Frivolous Cake Simple, Seldom and Sad Linger Now with Me, Thou Beauty I Married Her in Green Swelter's Song I Cannot Simply Stand and Watch Upon the Summit of a Hill Come, Sit Beside Me Dear, He Said Deliria The Sunlight Lies Upon the Fields Mine Was the One The Threads of Thought Are Not for Me Come Husband! Come, and Ply the Trade How Good It Is to Be Alone (1) How Good It Is to Be Alone (2) Upon My Golden Backbone All Over the Lilac Brine! The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass The Crocodile The Giraffe My Uncle Paul of Pimlico It Makes a Change What a Day It's Been! How Mournful to Imagine The Jailor and the Jaguar The Camel I Wish I Could Remember I Waxes and I Wanes, Sir The Hippopotamus A Languorous Life Sensitive, Seldom and Sad Roll Them Down One Day When They Had Settled Down Again! Again! and Yet Again Uncle George The King of Ranga-Tanga-Roon I Cannot Give You Reasons The Ballad of Sweet Pighead Hold Fast I Must Begin to Comprehend The Threads Remain White Mules at Prayer O Love, O Death, O Ecstasy Tintinnabulum Squat Ursula The Hideous Root The Men in Bowler Hats Are Sweet Aunts and Uncles The Osseous 'Orse Song of the Castle Poet How White and Scarlet Is that Face O Here It Is and There It Is - Little Spider 'It Worries Me to Know' A-Lolling on the Shores of Old Hawaii O'er Seas that Have No Beaches The Bullfrog and the Flies The Rhino and the Lark Richly in the Unctuous Dell Manifold Basket's Song With a One, Two, Up! In Ancient Days O Keep Away O Darling When a Story's Done Undertaker's Song (1) Undertaker's Song (2) Nannie Slagg's Song Fuchsia's Song Nannie Slagg's Lullaby Where the Little Dunderhead Lean Sideways on the Wind Of Pygmies, Palms and Pirates An Angry Cactus Does No Good I Cannot Give the Reasons O Little Fly How Fly the Birds of Heaven Leave the Stronger Fish or Fowl 'Shrink! Shrink!' An Old and Crumbling Parapet It Is Most Best The Hours of Night Are Drawing On Over the Pig-Shaped Clouds They Flew Come, Break the News to Me, Sweet Horse! What Though My Jaw The Trouble with Geraniums Crocodiles Along the Cold, Regurgitating Shore I Have My Price Jehovah, Jehovah Synopsis: Over the Border or The Adventures of Footfruit The Adventures of Footfruit or The Enthusiast Another Draft of Footfruit: Chapter 1 Crown Me with Hairpins Notes Key to the Figures of Speech Index of Titles Index of First Lines