A Child's Garden of Grammar
(amazon)Thomas M. Disch and David Morice (View Bio)
Hardcover: University of Michigan Press, 2002; Paperback: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
The very word "grammar" can cause palms and foreheads to sweat, throats to constrict, and put bodies to sleep. But here best-selling novelist—and also playwright, critic, and poet—Tom Disch collaborates with popular cartoonist and creator of Poetry Comics Dave Morice to create a gem. In demystifying the complex world of grammar, they have constructed a wonderful new entertainment stimulated by many of the rules of the English language. The engaging verbal and visual wit of the Disch/Morice duo amuses as it informs, appealing to both the grammatically challenged and the rare soul who delights in diagramming dense sentences. Disch's playful verses lead us to see anew rules long forgotten or never fully understood, while Morice's comic treatments flesh out the dry, chalky terrain of pronouns, tenses, infinitives, and preposition. A perfect gift for anyone needing introduction, or reintroduction, to the rules of the verbal road, and for those who enjoy the clever play of word and image.
"In...his wonderful versified teaching manual, A CHILD'S GARDEN OF GRAMMAR, Thomas Disch displays not only what is essential to comic verse — the perfect ear for they rhythms of verse and of colloquial speech, a perfect sense of timing, a particular angle of satiric vision — but an ultimate esthetic agenda which derives from a moral one." — American Academy of Arts and Letters
