Not Your Usual Anthology of Verse

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The busy writer, the busy teacher, any communicator of science needs a work like this, to find that half-forgotten couplet or allusion. You can buy it in one of two ways: as a set of three volumes that may be bought separately, or together in an omnibus volume, called ‘Not Your Usual Sources’, which is #6 in the Not Your Usual series. This work is already available.

This is the first of the separate volumes:
‘Not Your Usual Anthology of Verse’ ;
‘Not Your Usual Science Quotations’ ; and
‘Not Your Usual Australian Vignettes’ .

My verse collection began with a stray wish to illustrate a blog entry on bridges with William McGonagall’s ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, a classic piece of bad poetry about poor bridge design . From that simple start, I gathered more McGonagall, but soon realised I could not have such an imbalance in favour of poor verse.

From there, like Stephen Leacock’s young man, who sprang on his horse, I rode off in all directions. Here you will find good verse, bad verse, parodies verse , war verse, hackneyed and clichéd verse, Australian verse and rarely-seen verse: anything I found went into this file so I could use it again. This was a spare-time labour of love over many years, and it was for my own use, but I hope I have found some of your favourites as well.

This collection includes at least 270 poets , and there are something over 1800 poems, making this collection larger than the Norton Anthology, but the main plus is that you can search the text .

The choice was at all times based on my interests, and to that extent, it is biased. Still, you can use this collection to find the origins of:
* female of the species must be deadlier than the male; or
* all that glisters ; or
* East is East, and West is West…
all you have to do is apply the search function!

This collection was assembled as one of the commonplace books of a now somewhat ancient writer who has, over the years, used many of these quotations, though others are as yet waiting their moment. The collector of those words anticipates being Collected in the next dozen years or so by a chap on a horse named Binky, and plans, ere then, to enjoy advanced middle age, which means slowing down on the writing front.

So, in summary, you can opt to take up separate volumes like this one, or just grab ‘Not Your Usual Sources’, . That will always represent a major saving, because I want to encourage people to reach out beyond their comfort zone.