Variety – DaneCobain.com

Title: A Celebration

Author: Spike Milligan

Type: Poetry/Fiction

Page Count: 160

Rating: 3.75/5

This book was pretty cool because it covered quite a wide variety of Spike Milligan’s career, including little snippets of TV and radio shows, doodles and drawings and bits and bobs of poetry. Milligan was also a huge influence on a whole range of different people, from John Lennon to Monty Python, who admittedly isn’t actually a person.

It’s essentially almost a best of book, with highlights from a bunch of Milligan’s different works, as well as reminiscences from people like Dennis Norden and Jim Dale. That in itself makes it an interesting read, but the humour itself is spot on as well. It’s even missing most of the casual racism that eked its way into Milligan’s stuff, which is a bonus for me with my hella woke modern sensibilities.

Would I recommend it? Yes, if you like silly humour and stuff.

Learn more about A Celebration.

Deborah Alma – The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology | Review

Title: The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology

Author: Deborah Alma

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 194

Rating: 4*/5

Deborah Alma – The Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology

I’ve already read one of these mini collections of poetry from Deborah Alma, the emergency poet, and so I kind of knew what I was in for. Alma does a great job of pulling together a huge variety of both classic and contemporary poetry and the result is this stunning little hardback collection that’s so aesthetically pleasing you won’t want to put it down.

I also like how Alma includes some further recommended reading at the end, as well as the fact that one of the poems she recommended was by Charles Bukowski. But I also found a bunch of classic poems that I now want to memorise, including one that it turns out my granddad also knows – and he’s a working class dude from a small town. I can’t vouch for whether these poems actually help you to beat stress, but I will say that I enjoyed reading it and would read more in this series if and when they came out. So yeah!