The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam: With Apologies to Omar

A waggish poet mourns his lost tavern stool in this 1920s quatrain sequence, written with a tipsy elegy for the dead age of drink. J. L. Duff borrows the Persian form that made Omar Khayyam immortal and repurposes it to weep for speakeasies shuttered, ale gone underground, and a nation suddenly sober. Each stanza wobbles between mournful and mirthful, lamenting how the modern world traded the warm glow of camaraderie for tepid cups of tea. It's a book that takes its tippling very seriously, treating the loss of alcohol not merely as a personal inconvenience but as a kind of cultural death, the silencing of the old tavern songs, the end of careless evenings, the closing of the door between strangers and friends. Yet for all its boozy melancholy, the verse cracks wise at its own predicament. A funny, poignant, surprisingly tender lament for pleasures vanished and a world that chose virtue over warmth. For readers who like their poetry with a wink and their nostalgia spiked.