Magd Hamada Hamada itibaren Kishanpur, Bihar, Hindistan itibaren Kishanpur, Bihar, Hindistan

For the most part I preferred the notes on the poems more than the poems themselves. I liked getting a glimpse into the friendships and enmities of this guy who lived more than 250 years ago. And I can see how the rhymes and satire he used are clever. They just weren't as interesting to me as the way he and his poet friends would get into little one-upmanship contests, sending rhyming riddles whizzing back and forth to each other (complete with little notes about how little time it had taken to compose this particular entry). Or the controversies and arrests related to the publishing of particular poems. Or even the complicated process this editor, and various editors previously, have gone through to try to figure out whether a particular poem was actually written by Swift, or not. It's all this stuff that surrounds the poems that seem more interesting to me. Perhaps I would have preferred a book on the Life and Times of..., instead.

So far I am hooked...