Book description
 Nonsense', wrote Mervyn Peake,  can take you by the hand and
lead you nowhere. It's magic.' Peake (1911Â-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 from Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972),
with forty unpublished poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from
uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his
novels. It reprints complete Â- for the first time and in colour Â-
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.
'...full of a fastidious author's joy in the sheer music of language,
shot through with the sensitivity, melancholy and savage realism that
sings in all his work.' -- A L KENNEDY MERVYN PEAKE was one of the
best-loved illustrators of the twentieth centiry, and author of the
celebratd Titus books: Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus
Alone (1959). Born in china in 1911, he was educated at Tientsin Grammar
School, Eltham College in Kent and the Royal Academy Schools. From 1935
he taught life drawing at the Westminster School of Art. After being
called up in 1940 he underwent military training, but was invalided out
of the army following a breakdown in 1942. He worked for a while as an
official War Artist, then in 1945 travelled through Germany recording
the after-effects of the war, making drawings of Nazi war criminals,
POWs and the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. In 1946 he went with
his family to live on the island of Sark, returning in 1949 to teach
life drawing again, this time at the Central School of Art. He was
awarded the Heinemann Prize by the Royal Scoeity of Literature in 1951
for his novel Gormenghast and poetry collection The Glassblowers. His
play The Wit to Woo was performed at the Arts Theatre in 1957 but did
not prove a critical success, and he suffered a second breakdown after
its failure. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1958, and died
ten years later. G. PETER WINNINGTON is the leading Peake scholar. He
has published both an acclaimed biography of Peake and a critical study
of his oeuvre, taking in his novels, the poems, the plays, and his
graphic work. He has also edited much of Peake's previously unpublished
writing and printed it in his periodical, Peake Studies. ROBERT MASLEN
was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and has taught at Universities in
Oxford, London and Exeter. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the
University of Glasgow, where he teaches an MLitt in Creative Writing,
and has been Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, NH, the University
of St Thomas, MN, and the University of Lund, Sweden. He has published
articles on science fiction and renaissance literature, two books,
Shakespeare and Comedy and Elizabethan Fictions, and is the editor of
Mervyn Peake: Collected Poems and, with Peter Winnington, Complete
Nonsense (both published by Carcanet).
