Voice of the Poet, American Wits: Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley; & Robert Frost: The Voice of the Poet.

VOICE OF THE POET, AMERICAN WITS: Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Phyllis McGinley. 2003. Read by the authors. Abridged. 1 cd. 1 hour. Random House Audio. 0-553-75663-X. $19.95. Plastic; content notes, 64-page book. SA*

ROBERT FROST: THE VOICE OF THE POET, 2003. Read by the author. 1 cd. 1 hour. Random House Audio. 0-553-75661-3. $19.95. Plastic; content notes, 64-page book. SA*

Aristotle once wrote, "Wit is educated insolence." Odgen Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley, the three poets featured on American Wits, fit the definition, though some are more insolent than others. Parker wrote satire, but with a poignant twist. A member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, Parker pilloried women, the battle of the sexes, and mortality ("Gas smells awful-you might as well live."). Nash soon gave up "serious" verse to write humor. As the London Times wrote of him, "Mr. Nash is a most ingenious and amusing critic of frailty and absurdity." McGinley wrote of suburbia, with "its own landscape of shuttered homes, clipped lawns, up-scale village amenities... and also a way of life." Women are her specialty. Parker reads 13 of her works, Nash 24, and McGinley 13.

Robert Frost writes deceptively simple verse that seems to be about pastures, clouds, snow, and stone walls. Dig deeper and you find a philosopher, a poet of "loss and limitation and loneliness, of desolation and extinction." Here he reads 36 of his best-known poems, including "The Death of the Hired Man," "Birches," "Mending Wall," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." His flat country voice captures in his poems the rhythms and tones of real speech. As he once wrote, "There are only three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart of the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader."

The Voice of the Poet is an excellent series. Each CD comes with a booklet containing a brief biography of the poet, the text of each poem, and a list of other boors by and about the poet. Too bad we don't have Donne or Shakespeare. A must for every library. Janet Julian, Grafton, MA