SOURCE: “Nut Cases.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3712 (27 April 1973): 474.

In the following review, Funland and Other Poems is praised for its uniquely surrealist and comic quality.

The title-work of Dannie Abse's new book [Funland and Other Poems] is a sequence of nine poems loosely pegged to the euphemistic expression whereby a mental hospital is “a funhouse.” Society, or the world—“funland”—is a lunatic asylum, with “the superintendent,” “Mr. Poet,” “black-garbed priests / and scientists in long white coats” and others as the inhabitants. Dr. Abse's invention here runs much more to surrealist comedy and farcical fantasy than he has hitherto attempted, and it is a risky enterprise. Where everything is arbitrary, everything has to be taken on trust. For example, someone called Pythagorus starts a society and everyone joins it:

There are very few rules. Members promise to abstain from swallowing beans. They promise not to pick up what...