Griff Rhys Jones

Review first posted on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/836922/the-nation-s-favourite-twentieth-cen...

Unless people have stopped reading poetry after 1970, this is an odd collection of poetry - most of it was written in the first half of the 20th century. Also, a large part of the selection is nature based poetry, which is fine if that is what you are looking for.

My personal taste in poetry is more geared towards the human condition. Of course this is the point of most poetry, even that describing the natural world, but natural symbolism leaves me cold.… (mer)

The Nation's Favourite Poems is a solid, conservative selection of 100 poems, as is to be expected given its genesis. The poets are mostly British (with notable exceptions like Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe) and many of the poems will already be well-known to the reader, with heavyweights like Kipling (who took the #1 spot), Tennyson and Shakespeare represented. By ranking the poems from 1 to 100, the book has also opened itself to criticism (Kipling's 'If' is a good poem, but probably shouldn't be #1). To be honest, I wasn't overly enamoured with any of the top 10, although 'Dulce et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen has always had stopping power, and W.B. Yeats' 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' struck a chord.

The ones I favoured most were the ones I already knew well (e.g. 'Ozymandias', 'The Raven', 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', 'Ulysses', 'High Flight') and there were very few of the lesser-known ones that made me sit up and take notice (Louis MacNeice's 'Prayer Before Birth' being an exception). The poems for children were fun, with Michael Rosen's 'Chocolate Cake' in particular taking me back to my childhood. Essentially, the collection is a good starting point for newbies who want to sample some good, well-known poetry, but for those like me who read a fair bit of poetry it is a rather unnecessary exercise.… (mer)

I picked this book up with great expectations but put it back down again with some disappointment. Griff Rhys Jones is a great comedian and I've been a fan of him from "Not the Nine O'Clock News" and "Alas Smith and Jones" for ages, so I expected some great humour in between the pages of "To the Baltic with Bob".

What we got was a book that gave me the odd smile but mainly rambled about the author's history of sailing, a description of his yacht, his shock at the high cost of marine maps, the quality of the showers at the sailing club in St Petersburg and the fact he was paying his friends to come sailing with him.

The highlights actually came with references to Rhys Jones's son George, now a young man but about whom I remembered a reference to him as a baby in "Alas Smith and Jones", and Rhys Jones' mentions of his old partner in laughs, the late, great Mel Smith. Still, "To the Baltic with Bob" was a pleasant enough way to pass the time that I probably would have wasted anyway.… (mer)