I read this collection while feeling rather rough with a cold (with the hope of lifting my spirits a little), but to be honest I found most of the poems contained within to be not all that funny – a quite substantial failing in a collection of humerous poems. In the interest of fairness I should admit to being fairly new to the world of poetry (I only started to really 'get' poetry about a year or so ago) so the fault may very well lie with the reader here, and of course feeling awful will undoubtably dampen one's sense of humour somewhat also. So with these mitigating factors in mind, I'll simply state that for this virus-infested poetry novice, this book was something of a disappointment.

Veniamin Kaverin, one of the best loved Soviet novelists, once proclaimed that the two best Russian writers were R L Stevenson and ETA Hoffman of the Nutcracker fame. Much later, in 1965, a wise and respectable Kaverin published his book of memoirs 'Hello, Brother, It's So Hard to Write', which included a humorous account of an evening in The Pegasus Stable, a Moscow literary cafe popular in the late 1910s - early 1920s.

He mentions an obscure poetic school of the time called "ничевоки" - 'noughtters' (nothingers, nadaists) who espoused minimalism in verse. Their poems often were a chain of a few nouns in nominative, and that was that.

'Here was the poet Truvor Kanunnikov', writes Kaverin. 'He never wrote anything. Not because he couldn't, but as a matter of principle. He was one of the noughtters, an extreme one. He proclaimed that the supreme level of poetry was the blank white page'.

I have always thought that Kaverin's story was a joke. Amazingly it isn't. The other day I was reading a brilliantly compiled book of humorous poems of British and American authors The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (Faber poetry) (edited by Wendy Cope) and found several poems straight from the book of the noughtters.

Here is one:

The Lover Writes a One-Word-Poem

You!

(Gavin Ewart)

And this one is even better:

On Going to Meet a Zen Master in Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him
for A.G.

(Don Patterson)

(Note: it's just the title and the dedication, the rest is a blank page).

By the way, any better suggestions as to how to render ничевоки into English?

There is also a Russian version of this review on my blog. ( )

Humorous verse - mostly aimed at adults, but a few good bellylaughs for children too.