Alice took a Detour and other meanderings by Karen Georghiou

Alice took a Detour and other meanderings by Karen Georghiou (Rag Publishing, London, 2014) Karen Georghiou’s book based on the Alice in Wonderland stories by Lewis Carol is a mixture of stories, poems and drawings derived from the original material yet also bringing something bright, interesting and refreshing to intrigue readers. Nonsense poems and nonsensical stories start out by declaring ‘why are we here reading this story?’. ‘Well we must be mad’ and that’s a good enough reason to read whimsical nonsense, isn’t it? The Cheshire Cat retorts similarly to Alice and then we are on our way down the rabbit hole and beyond the Mad Hatter’s tea party probably being clobbered by or clobbering the Bandersnatch, the Jubjub Bird or even the mighty Jabberwocky. The problem with this collection is possibly declared in its title which sets out too clearly authorial hesitations about the Lewis Carol original. The collection lacks a central cohesiveness that might have connected together somewhat disparate material yet this is certainly a book worth reading and with lots of pleasing, humorous interludes, wordplay and nonsensical inversions, reversions and introversions. I thought the poems were generally better crafted than the stories and that the strength of the collection lay there. As well as being meanderings though the collection has a strong central theme which it embellishes with alacrity: This Life is What What life is this Whose mind steadily ticks And time tricks past, We lose all glance And winding down To where no sound Has risen since Or prophet rinsed? Paul Murphy

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