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‘I can be quite obscure and practically marzipan.’
From the macabre to the brilliantly off-beat, Mervyn
Peake’s nonsense verse can, like marzipan, be enjoyed
by young and old alike. This collection of writings and drawings
has been selected by his widow, Maeve Gilmore, and it introduces
a whole gallery of characters and creatures, such as the Dwarf
of Battersea and Footfruit. Quirky and comical, occasionally
alarming, but always magical.
‘Peake deserves a place among the eccentrics of the
English tradition alongside Sterne, Blake, Lear, Carroll and
Belloc.’ — Times Literary Supplement
‘He can try on the strangest clothes without losing his
own strange identity . . . a genuinely haunted imagination
which stamps everything he wrote or drew.’ — Guardian
MERVYN PEAKE was born in China in 1911 of medical missionary
parents. He began to draw, paint and write stories at an early
age. His first book of poems, Shapes and Sounds, was
published in 1941. He is probably best known for his Titus
novels — Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus
Alone — but other well-known poetry collections include:
The Glassblowers and The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb.
He married Maeve Gilmore in 1937. He was awarded the W.H.
Heinemann Foundation Prize by the Royal Society of Literature
in 1950. Mervyn Peake died after a long illness in 1968. |
