Tuesday 4 August 2015

Book 61 of 2014: A Christmas Faggot by Alfred Gurney

As you probably saw yesterday, I'm preparing for Christmas a little bit early. I've not gone as far as reading Christmas books yet (give me a little more time) but I have officially started Christmas shopping now! So it's kind of fitting that today's book review is the charmingly titled A Christmas Faggot by Alfred Gurney.


It's a very short (roughly 69 pages in my free ebook edition) of poems with a decidedly Christmas feel. They tend to focus on the religious aspect of the season, particularly dealing with the Nativity story; this was unsurprising given the time it would've been written.

I read this in less than an hour, the day before Mr Click's birthday, last thing at night. It's very festive-flavoured and it's a fairly easy read if you just need a little poetic Christmas boost.

Some of the poems include a mention of where they were written and I noticed that a couple of them were written in Ballachulish. That's a teeny village in the Scottish Highlands where I did a teaching placement. The school is lovely and I have many happy memories of that place so it was nice, if unexpected, to see it get a mention.

The poems had some nice rhyme schemes and metre. I find that I pay more attention to that sort of thing since I studied it with the OU. It's useful because before I used to find poems that I didn't particularly like but couldn't put my finger on exactly why; now I can recognise that I'm particularly drawn to certain metres.

I also feel like I should maybe explain the title as it's explained in the book. A faggot is a bundle of sticks which are used for heating and this is a bundle of heartwarming poems. It's not a title that has aged well, but it's charming in its eccentricities.

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Let me know what you think. :-)