Books by John Ciardi

Just as Ciardi has never joined a group, so he has never asked that his poems be approved-they are simply there, written as they demanded to be written from inside their own experience of themselves. They are there-and they will not go away.

Hurling limericks at each other, a dozen at a clip, they charge from the lists (the list includes a gross of limericks by each). It is a brilliant confrontation in one of the English language's oldest and most demandingly rigid traditions.