Come into My Parlour: Cautionary Verses and Instructive Tales For the New Millennium

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This is the kind of book that brings out the curmudgeon in me. Bill
Richardson, a sometime CBC radio host, can be regularly found on Vicki
Gabereau’s show reading his light verse, often to the delighted
chortles of the show’s host. If you like to hear him reading on the
radio, you might enjoy this book. I say might because I too have often
chortled along with Bill in the afternoon, but I didn’t chortle when I
read this collection of occasional verse. Indeed, I found it dull,
dreary, drab, and awkward.

The light versifier must be a minor master of conventional forms. His
verses must scan and rhyme, but they must not fall into dullness.
Richardson, alas, allows his rhythms to fall into a soporific monotony
that causes the mind to wander to other subjects and the eye to
gravitate toward the window. He commits the ultimate sin of the genre:
he fails to entertain.