IN a new blast at the heebie-jeebies of suburban life, Ogden Nash serenely continues to steamroller the Muses to the delight of all spectators. His poetry, which has now come to represent a new genre of versification, is more rambling and full of humorous digressions than ever. As in his former books, he mutilates metre and rhythm with gusto, but here he is more successful in his butchery of poetic principle, for his creations are bristling with original, biting observations that have the reader chuckling at every line. Only infrequently does he lapse, inevitably perhaps, into frequently does he lapse, inevitably perhaps, into over absurdities of expression bordering on baby-talk. But this occasional coyness detracts little from the general effect.

Mr.Nash has identified himself, in the Guestian manner, with the vast horde of Ordinary Citizens who are struggling to keep abreast of modern techniques of eating, dressing, plumbing and commuting. He has paused in the marathon to express his opinions on some of the more irritating aspects of his existence. His likes and dislikes are typically those of city-dwellers who curse and sweat over far-rolling collar-buttons, wives who make their husbands wait, parties next door, Blue Mondays, and socks that shrink uncontrollably. His comical fumings over the enraging trivialities of everyday life inevitably reduce the reader to howls of laughter over his own experiences with identical problems.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Nash's poetry is the novel way in which he obtains like sounds from very dissimilar words. He is not above making major orthographical changes in a word in order to achieve versification. He says, for example:

"Let us not be sheep like a Fascist audience Who get played upon like concertinas or accaudlence.

A few critics have cried unfair tactics, notably some English reviewers who seem to feel that such syllabic pruning and repairing is too much like filing the parts of a jig-saw puzzle to make them fit. If such were the case, Mr. Nash's poems would not present an understandable picture of what he primarily intended to say; but actually he is highly successful in presenting his ideas in a humorous fashion. Outside of one or two of the strange case-histories, which degenerate into vehicles for a pet pun inserted at the end, Mr. Nash has written an excellent, laughable book of lyrical doggerel.