Take A Girl Like You

Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust lost love booze money and the lack of it old age death—and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody Amis wrote satires epigrams and rueful and scornful songs that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small entirely individual and memorably bracing body of work. As Amis writes “Beauty they tell me is a dangerous thing Whose touch will burn but I’m asbestos see”