Queen of All the Dust Balls

Peter Roberts is the former Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

One dictionary defines doggerel as “trivial, worthless, or irregular
verse.” The present volume of doggerel is not particularly irregular.
It scans, more or less. But the rest of the definition is dead on.

All doggerel is a joke. This book begins with a joke, about a man with
a vacuum cleaner attachment attached to his head. It goes on, in a lumpy
way, to other jokes, some of them about excretion and ejaculation.
Specialized humor. Many of the rhymes are only approximate, though
surely rhyme is the essence of doggerel. And there is too much. Each
“poem” is too long, and the whole book is too long.

Lewis Carroll wrote doggerel, as did Edward Lear. Shakespeare tried his
hand at it. But these masters demonstrated that even doggerel is not
merely a wander through an interminable desert of vaguely connected
images. The owl and the pussycat putting to sea in a beautiful pea-green
boat could be called doggerel, although neither trivial nor worthless.
It is sudden, vivid—indeed, immortal. What then are we to make of
“Her life on foot’s pedestrian. With wheels her life’s a gas. / At
36, she’s learned new tricks. She’s set to kick some ass.” The
reader waits in vain for the sharp image, the absurd juxtaposition, the
clever inverted syntax, the invitation to the childish imagination.

Not good enough to be included in the long and honorable tradition of
doggerel in English.