Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 5. March 30 1981
Recommended text — Book — Anthology of Verse and Prose Vol. X
Recommended text
Book
Anthology of Verse and Prose Vol. X.
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"I'm a Cheshire mouse."
What is this pretty book with the red cover I asked myself as I sniffed around in the Salient editor's office looking for the petty cash. A Lamda anthology of verse and prose, came answer. It is supposed to be being reviewed.
My curiosity was aroused; what the hell is a Lamda? Some obscure eastern religious sect perhaps? NO!!! Lamda is the 'London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art', and this is an anthology of pieces intended for use in examinations conducted by that organisation. It's an elocution book.
What are Enjambements?
Now elocution is, despite the ridicule with which most people speak of it, something of which many students have some experience; a quick scout round among my friends revealed that most of them at one stage or another had had something to do with speech and drama classes. Certainly the thought of 'speech and drama' brought many images crowding into this reviewer's head; competition festival mothers with bright red lipstick, loud voices, and precocious eight-year-old Oliviers and Glenda Jacksons; the sweat pouring off as I waited outside the Door of the Examining Room for the Examiner to summon me in to say my one or two prepared pieces and answer a few simple questions on enjambements, inflection, and the neutral vowel. It was really not so much a hobby as a way of life, and for all those hundreds of students who have been through the mill a glance through the Lamda anthology will probably provide quite a nostalgic experience.
A Source of Income
But the book is not really aimed at the reader so much as the serious teacher of speech and drama. I know of several
students at this university who find tutoring the offspring of latter-day Mrs Worthingtons to be quite a lucrative source of income. For them this book could be quite invaluable. It contains a good selection of verse and prose extracts graded for difficulty, beginning with a little number by 'Anon' for children and ending with a prose extract from Virginia Woolf. It could save a teacher a lot of time in fereting around in books looking for nice children's poems, and although it contains no drama extracts for 'character sketches', the prose pieces would be ideal for say a prepared reading class, or for training in sightreading. It is a damned nuisance having to hunt out short, self contained chunks of prose from novels, and this anthology provides a good number of them for the teacher.
Lamda do not, as far as I know, conduct examinations in New Zealand, but their centennary anthology is none the less a book which many teachers of speech might find a useful part of their bookshelf.
S.D.