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This slim volume offers four discrete analyses of the margins of Apollinaire's writing: the verse bestiary illustrated with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy; the twenty-two short, experimental poems he published in 1914 under the titles Banalités and Quelconqueries; his interest in children's rhymes and folklore, and their influence on poems such as ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, ‘La Maison des Morts’ and ‘La Blanche Neige’; and the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. As a succession of close readings, this is a useful survey, although Tirésias has already inspired much scholarly analysis, as the author acknowledges. The analysis of the relationship between text and image in Le Bestiaire, using Barthes's reflections in ‘Le Message photographique’, offers a subtle and sensitive introduction to his visual poetics, and the chapter on the subversive Quelconqueries draws useful parallels between proto-Surrealist iconoclasm, metapoetic reflections on the limits of literature, surprise, the everyday and the erotic. The comptines of children's playground games offer an interesting angle on the ‘deeply disturbing psychological study’ (p. 103) which Apollinaire offers in his ‘Salomé’, while the chapter on Tirésias shows eroticism emerging as the driving force behind human existence as the play revolutionizes modern aesthetics with an effervescent blend of cultural artefacts, irony, parody, word play and burlesque. Although the rather perfunctory conclusion leaves readers to draw these parallels for themselves, as a whole this volume succeeds in showing Apollinaire working throughout his career at the aesthetic edge between sense and nonsense.

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