The Lamb Cycle

What former English major wouldn’t get a kick out of “The Lamb Cycle,” by David R. Ewbank, with illustrations by Kate Feiffer (Brandeis University Press)? In it, Ewbank, a Kent State University professor emeritus, imagines how English poets — from Spenser and Shakespeare to Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith — might have reworked the Mother Goose classic “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Here’s the appropriately macabre opening of Coleridge’s “The Crime of the Urchin Mary”: “It was an ancient crone who wrote / Silly rhymes for tots / Was stopped by a maid in a pinafore / With blood-red polkadots.” That last phrase delivers the true Gothic shiver.

David Ewbank's versatility in the art of literary imitation is nothing short of shapeshifting.

The Lamb Cycle made me laugh with delight even as it delivered a masterclass on poetic form. David R. Ewbank captures each of the great poets’ stylistic tics and thematic preoccupations, and imbues them with a visionary verve all his own. The poems are perfectly paired with Kate Feiffer’s elegant illustrations, brimming with wit and wonderment.

I read through [the poems] and thought that they were funny and brilliant... I had a vision pretty immediately of what the illustrations could look like.

David R. Ewbank has just published the funniest poetry book of the year. But it isn’t just funny: it is “seriously funny”, to appropriate the felicitous title of the poetry anthology edited a few years ago by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby... Indeed, several of his parodies would rank among the best poems ever written by his targets, had they in fact written them. Endlessly delightful.

A tour de force for our times... The Lamb Cycle gives us a new take on Mary and her lamb. Whether evoking the Renaissance, the Victorian Age, or modern life in language and art, David Ewbank and Kate Feiffer perform with panache.

"The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb (Had They Thought of It First)" is a silly and high-minded book, an absolute barrel of laughs for those deeply into English lit and, I suspect, a bit of fun for any sort of reader.