It may be assumed that Ogden Nash is America's No. 1 family man. The title of Family Reunion therefore suggests a selection of the master's work as closely knit as the poet's knitting allows, with the notion in mind that any member of any family can read it with comfort and delight. The present selection which Mr. Nash has made fully lives up to this happy expectation. There are verses here for father, for mother, and verses about children and about various animals domestic, feral, and in between. I should not say that the verses about children are also for children, though I am not really sure that the whole book is not addressed to children as much as to beleaguered parents. I for one have never been quite satisfied with any previous selection of Mr. Nash's verse as representing the total area of his paper work. Somehow the present volume, assembled as it were under one leaky roof, is the volume for which one reader at least has been waiting. Some day the critics will either divide Mr. Nash's output into the bachelor and parent categories or else discover that by some osmotic process they are all for one and one for all. Just now it is too early to say.

In one sense Family Reunion is a series of selections. I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that Nash had written more than one verse about dogs, but he has. People who think that he is all froth and frivolity might do well to consider "For a Good Dog." It is a best of breed; so poignantly felt that the reader may find it difficult to turn again to lighter things. Or take the really beautiful "Tin Wedding Whistle." For honest sentiment controlled (as so many moderns fear it and cannot control it) give me the humorist with his guard for the moment down.

The animal and nature verses, apart from the three or four dog poems, are a little book in themselves. I hope some day that Mr. Nash's publisher will find his collective self in the mood to put all these and more together under one cover, with plenty of appropriate illustrations. No one save Belloc on a much smaller scale has ever approached them. No, not even the early A. P. Herbert, whose influence like that of Belloc is here mildly traceable in scattered pages.

But for all this trace—or any other, like that of Hoffenstein—any rereading of Nash (and this book is mostly rereading) but increases one's astonishment at the genuine originality of his voice and method. In the small world of light verse, as I have been at some pains to study it, he and he almost alone constantly seems to be saying things that have never been said before. Such as:

In far Tibet
There live a lama,
He got no poppa,
Got no momma,

He got no wife,
He got no chillun,
Got no use
For penicillun,

He got no soap,
He got no opera,
He don't know Irium
From copra …

He got no teeth,
He got no gums,
Don't eat no Spam,
Don't need no Turns …

Indeed, the
Ignorant Have-Not
Don't even know
What he don't got….

If anyone has ever written anything like that before my name is Edward Lear. And curiously enough in all such marvelous writing there is for me the distant and gentle undertone of sadness, from which true nonsense is perhaps never entirely separated. But when Mr. Nash consciously tries his hand at nonsense where many of the words are freshminted nonsense, too, he comes a cropper. "Jabberwocky" succeeds where Nash's "Geddondillo" does not. I see nothing funny in

Appetency lights the corb of the guzzard now,
The ancient beveldric it otley lost…

This is not even as successful as the T. S. Eliot imitations of Lear. Thackeray could do it and one or two others. Finem respice.

The main thing is that we have Ogden Nash, nearly always his own unstudied self. In this evil world and at this evil hour, his voice is something beyond price.

A husband at a lecture
Twitches his architecture.

Nash defies a lecture or a book review or quibbling or even the will not to read him. You are simply a part of this family reunion. We all are.