To present an adequate picture of the blithe, careless quality of Ogden Nash's rib-tickling poems one would have to be another Ogden Nash—and he is sui generis. He takes his fellow man, and woman, apart in his new collection of vivacious verse [Good Intentions]—the first in four years—with engaging cheerfulness and an insight into their foibles that is almost uncanny. This deep and mellow understanding of human nature pervades his work and gives substance to what otherwise might be only frothy, funny verse.

Few of the perennial bores have escaped his stabbing pen, and his portrait of the "man who when he bares his breast to life it comes back to him all covered with welts, because everything that happens to him is much worse than the same thing happening to any one else … Other people with indigestion just have indigestion, but his indigestion ranks somewhere between appendicitis and cholera" is life-like.

His particular enmity is reserved for the horny-handed enthusiast who always encores the most boring numbers. His head should be amputated and brought to him on a silver platter, and it might be well, he adds, to cut it off twice.

His wit is a perennial spring, but he is a poet by force majeure, for he has mangled, masticated and maltreated every known rule of grammer, prosody and spelling. When a word proves recalcitrant he attacks it brutally, applies an anesthesia, performs an appendectomy or lops off a limb, and the result is such Nashian rhymes as snuffle and uffle (awful), Autumn and tautumn (taught 'em), and "parsley is gharaley."

Mr. Nash is encyclopedic in his interests, for he has collected his reactions to such diversified topics as skinks, skunks, ganders, termites and octopi; osteopaths, editors, doctors and big executives; serenades, allergies and assorted chocolates.

His genius for arresting the attention by a single line—"Sally Rand needs an extra hand," for instance—is as infallible as that of the FBI in arresting criminals. No one could refrain from reading a poem which began "Roses are things which Christmas is not a bed of"; your curiosity would certainly be aroused by a lady whose "one eye looks like Goya and the other paranoia"; and you would be forced to agree with an author who confesses "I prefer charity to hospitality, because charity begins at home but hospitality ends there." His definition of September as the month that "makes you glad to get back where you were glad to get away from" has the accuracy and succinctness of a Webster grown whimsical in his cups.

Good Intentions has one serious poem to serve as a foil for the others—"Heil, Heilige Nacht!"—an ironic and deeply felt indictment of war at Christmas time. It sounds like a funeral-bell tolling in the midst of a jazz number, but its sincerity and restrained bitterness give it real emotional power.

But as the book, with this exception, is the gayest and most amusing of the season, this appreciation should end on a lighter note, and there is none better than Mr. Nash's sidelight on the city in which we live:

Here men walk aloneFor most of their lives,What with hydrants for dogsAnd windows for wives.