His and Hers: An Alphabet Book

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English at St. Jerome’s
College, University of Waterloo.

Like most alphabet books, His and Hers is not for children. Knight’s
verses might best be categorized as experimental poetry. The alphabet
prescribes the structure both of specific poems and of the book as a
whole. The alphabet also imposes alliteration on the poems that treat of
particular letters: for example, “Evasive Emily (Where was Dorothy?),
/ So Excellent, Educated, Easy as Embolism.” All of these poems (set
on a Macintosh SE and printed by photocopy) accentuate the visual aspect
of language by using a rich variety of typefaces, usually in ways that
further characterization. For the most part, Taylor’s illustrations
function as the graphic design does: they present in a pen-and-ink
cartoon the subjects of the poems. Only rarely do they extend,
complicate, or qualify what the words establish. All in all, in other
words, the book is more his than hers.

The blatant artificiality of Knight’s structure sometimes provides
pleasure—as when, while keeping the sequence of the alphabet, his
verse moves easily and makes good sense. More often, however, the
structure produces strain, though if readers can get beyond this
awkwardness, they will find some comic, some satiric, some pathetic,
“Some Realistic (if) Quaintly Positive Observations” on men, women,
and their relationships. And Knight’s tone is in the end—in the last
lines of the last letter—quite heartening: “Hail Zeus! and a Zone of
Zinnias: / And to love our any-&-every Love, with Zest.”