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Death and Taxes
New Viking,, 1931.. Very good in fuschia cloth (prev owner's name on front endpaper, some discoloration from the binder's glue on the endpapers, cloth faded on spine. but gold lettering is still distinct.). First trade edition, with 'regular edition, published June 1931, second printing before publication' on copyright page. A lovely copy of this inexpensive reprint.
62 pages, Hardback
First published January 1, 1931
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About the author
Dorothy Parker
328 books2,051 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Dorothy Parker was an American writer, poet and critic best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.
Dorothy Parker was an American writer, poet and critic best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 15, 2025
Death and taxes are said to be inevitable, and inevitability is a major theme of Dorothy Parker’s 1931 poetry collection Death and Taxes. With large helpings of the mordant humor for which she was so well-known, Parker spends much of this collection suggesting that disillusionment is just about as certain as, well, death and taxes.
Dorothy Parker arrived at her downbeat view of life via plenty of hard-won wisdom of her own. Her childhood, by her own account, was traumatic, and she carried into adulthood a sardonic outlook that informed what she wrote for The New Yorker and as a member of the Algonquin Round Table or "Vicious Circle," a group of writers who shared Parker’s caustic outlook on life. When she worked in Hollywood, she was twice nominated for screenwriting Oscars, including a nomination for the original A Star Is Born in 1937. After the war, her strong advocacy for civil liberties caused her to be suspected of communist ties, and she was blacklisted. No wonder various filmmakers have sought to bring Parker’s tempestuous life to the screen, as when Alan Rudolph directed Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), with Jennifer Jason Leigh well-cast as Parker.
The caustic qualities of Parker’s work, as seen in Death and Taxes, come forth in poems like “Distance.” Many of the salient characteristics of Parker’s work can be seen in this short poem: just three or four beats to a line; an abab rhyme scheme; a first stanza that makes the reader think it’s one kind of poem; and then a final stanza that controverts the reader’s expectations with a harshly humorous “twist ending”:
Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.
It were a sweet and gallant pain
To be a sea apart,
But, oh, to have you down the lane
Is bitter to my heart. (p. 16)
Among the other poems that stood out to me from Death and Taxes was “Tombstones in the Starlight,” a multi-part poem that reminded me of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) in the way it showed graves revealing the secrets of their now-dead occupants. A Pretty Lady who loved the warmth of “a heart against her own” now finds that “It is forever bitter cold, in Hell” (p. 27). Of an Actress, it is said that her name “Shines, as it shone while she was still on earth”, while the moss below “Obscured the figures of her date of birth” (p. 31). And I took particular interest in the story of “The Fisherwoman”, particularly through the clever way in which Parker incorporated a fishing metaphor at the end:
The man she had was kind and clean
And well enough for every day,
But, oh, dear friends, you should have seen
The one that got away! (p. 29)
But Parker is not always so carefully cold and distant in her deployment of irony. “Prayer for a New Mother,” with its gentle, lyrical invocation of the story of Mary of Nazareth, sets forth its ironies in a manner that is tragic and moving rather than sarcastic, leading up to the poem’s devastating third and fourth stanzas that remind the reader of the suffering that awaits both Mary and her son Jesus:
The things she knew, let her forget again –
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.
Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd.
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man. (p. 50)
The story is a familiar one, of course; but just knowing that Mary will never enjoy those anticipated years of comfort and companionship with her son Jesus – seeing that fate framed in terms of every mother’s hope – is heartbreaking.
But by the end of the collection, Parker is back to her sarcastic ways; the concluding poem, titled “Summary,” sums things up with a downbeat look at the possibility of finding love over a lifetime:
Every love’s the love before
In a duller dress,
That’s the measure of my lore –
Here’s my bitterness:
Would I knew a little more,
Or very much less! (p. 62)
The slight change of meter in the last line brings the poem, and the collection, to an abrupt conclusion, and draws the reader’s attention to the inevitability of disillusionment. It is inevitable that we will be disappointed, particularly in love, and the only value of that knowledge is that, with each new love relationship, we know in advance that this relationship too will end in disappointment. Or, as the rock singer Bob Seger once put it in that “Against the Wind” song, “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
Such is the work of Dorothy Parker – sharp, cool, merciless. It’s probably not for everyone; but it is a bracing experience to spend time in the company of this smart, tough writer who wielded the tools of poetry as if they were an assassin’s arsenal of lethal weapons.
Dorothy Parker arrived at her downbeat view of life via plenty of hard-won wisdom of her own. Her childhood, by her own account, was traumatic, and she carried into adulthood a sardonic outlook that informed what she wrote for The New Yorker and as a member of the Algonquin Round Table or "Vicious Circle," a group of writers who shared Parker’s caustic outlook on life. When she worked in Hollywood, she was twice nominated for screenwriting Oscars, including a nomination for the original A Star Is Born in 1937. After the war, her strong advocacy for civil liberties caused her to be suspected of communist ties, and she was blacklisted. No wonder various filmmakers have sought to bring Parker’s tempestuous life to the screen, as when Alan Rudolph directed Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), with Jennifer Jason Leigh well-cast as Parker.
The caustic qualities of Parker’s work, as seen in Death and Taxes, come forth in poems like “Distance.” Many of the salient characteristics of Parker’s work can be seen in this short poem: just three or four beats to a line; an abab rhyme scheme; a first stanza that makes the reader think it’s one kind of poem; and then a final stanza that controverts the reader’s expectations with a harshly humorous “twist ending”:
Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.
It were a sweet and gallant pain
To be a sea apart,
But, oh, to have you down the lane
Is bitter to my heart. (p. 16)
Among the other poems that stood out to me from Death and Taxes was “Tombstones in the Starlight,” a multi-part poem that reminded me of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) in the way it showed graves revealing the secrets of their now-dead occupants. A Pretty Lady who loved the warmth of “a heart against her own” now finds that “It is forever bitter cold, in Hell” (p. 27). Of an Actress, it is said that her name “Shines, as it shone while she was still on earth”, while the moss below “Obscured the figures of her date of birth” (p. 31). And I took particular interest in the story of “The Fisherwoman”, particularly through the clever way in which Parker incorporated a fishing metaphor at the end:
The man she had was kind and clean
And well enough for every day,
But, oh, dear friends, you should have seen
The one that got away! (p. 29)
But Parker is not always so carefully cold and distant in her deployment of irony. “Prayer for a New Mother,” with its gentle, lyrical invocation of the story of Mary of Nazareth, sets forth its ironies in a manner that is tragic and moving rather than sarcastic, leading up to the poem’s devastating third and fourth stanzas that remind the reader of the suffering that awaits both Mary and her son Jesus:
The things she knew, let her forget again –
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the queer old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing;
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.
Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd.
The smell of rough-cut wood, the trail of red,
The thick and chilly whiteness of the shroud
That wraps the strange new body of the dead.
Ah, let her go, kind Lord, where mothers go
And boast his pretty words and ways, and plan
The proud and happy years that they shall know
Together, when her son is grown a man. (p. 50)
The story is a familiar one, of course; but just knowing that Mary will never enjoy those anticipated years of comfort and companionship with her son Jesus – seeing that fate framed in terms of every mother’s hope – is heartbreaking.
But by the end of the collection, Parker is back to her sarcastic ways; the concluding poem, titled “Summary,” sums things up with a downbeat look at the possibility of finding love over a lifetime:
Every love’s the love before
In a duller dress,
That’s the measure of my lore –
Here’s my bitterness:
Would I knew a little more,
Or very much less! (p. 62)
The slight change of meter in the last line brings the poem, and the collection, to an abrupt conclusion, and draws the reader’s attention to the inevitability of disillusionment. It is inevitable that we will be disappointed, particularly in love, and the only value of that knowledge is that, with each new love relationship, we know in advance that this relationship too will end in disappointment. Or, as the rock singer Bob Seger once put it in that “Against the Wind” song, “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
Such is the work of Dorothy Parker – sharp, cool, merciless. It’s probably not for everyone; but it is a bracing experience to spend time in the company of this smart, tough writer who wielded the tools of poetry as if they were an assassin’s arsenal of lethal weapons.
January 19, 2020
Transition
Too long and quickly have I lived to vow
The woe that stretches me shall never wane,
Too often seen the end of endless pain
To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow.
I know, I know- again the shriveled bough
Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain,
And these hard lands be quivering with grain-
I tell you only: it is Winter now.
What if I know, before the Summer goes
Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest?
What is it now, that June shall surely bring
New promise, with the swallow and the rose?
My heart is water, that I first must breast
The terrible, slow loveliness of Spring.
Jan 05, 19
Too long and quickly have I lived to vow
The woe that stretches me shall never wane,
Too often seen the end of endless pain
To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow.
I know, I know- again the shriveled bough
Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain,
And these hard lands be quivering with grain-
I tell you only: it is Winter now.
What if I know, before the Summer goes
Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest?
What is it now, that June shall surely bring
New promise, with the swallow and the rose?
My heart is water, that I first must breast
The terrible, slow loveliness of Spring.
Jan 05, 19
June 19, 2018
my land is bare of chattering folk
the clouds are low along the ridges
and sweet's the air with curly smoke
from all my burning bridges
the clouds are low along the ridges
and sweet's the air with curly smoke
from all my burning bridges
June 4, 2018
Dotty is definitely being shelved as my go-to poet for relationships gone wrong then given a quippy, 180 one-liner. This had the most literary references in the poems, and I hate when they do that. I know you're intelligent and have read a lot, you don't need to impress me with it. It's just boring and I have to do all the leg work to try and figure out what your referencing. This, it gets my goat.
September 10, 2013
She is a clever writer. A bit sassy(satirical) and a down-to earth-romantic, it's plain rhyming verse of an older kind. I'm really terrible at writing reviews... so I'll add some examples (here I give you two very short ones, but there are longer ones, series, more serious ones too.. sadder ones.)
SANCTUARY
My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.
THE FLAW IN PAGANISM
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
SANCTUARY
My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.
THE FLAW IN PAGANISM
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
April 2, 2014
Sardonic. Fun.
June 13, 2019
A frolic, mostly. And a good one. Wit to burn.
July 30, 2018
Witty, sassy, thought provoking.
September 6, 2011
Wry and slightly acerbic, as promised. Only about half as dreary as expected (I don't recall any poems dealing directly with taxes). Death is front-and-center, though, funny and bittersweet by turns. Worth the quick read.
January 15, 2014
Funny and witty Parker has some real snark and I love it.
February 27, 2024
I am a huge fan of Parker and have quite a library of her and the Round Table patrons.
This 1931 original printing I found at an antique store for a very price a couple weeks ago. I'd read it before in a compilation a couple decades ago. This time I got to read the actual book. What a tremendous treat! So many gems included!
The overall poetry is fine, it's individual lines that make the whole so worthwhile.
The standard Parker themes are throughout: her idealism of the male species and death in various means.
Bottom line: I recommend this book. 10 out of ten points.
This 1931 original printing I found at an antique store for a very price a couple weeks ago. I'd read it before in a compilation a couple decades ago. This time I got to read the actual book. What a tremendous treat! So many gems included!
The overall poetry is fine, it's individual lines that make the whole so worthwhile.
The standard Parker themes are throughout: her idealism of the male species and death in various means.
Bottom line: I recommend this book. 10 out of ten points.
Read
February 1, 2024-Midnight-
The stars are soft as flowers, and as near;
The hills are webs of shadow, slowly spun;
No separate leaf or single blade is here -
All blend to one.
No moonbeam cuts the air; a sapphire light
Rolls lazily, and slips again to rest.
There is no edged thing in all this night,
Save in my breast.
The stars are soft as flowers, and as near;
The hills are webs of shadow, slowly spun;
No separate leaf or single blade is here -
All blend to one.
No moonbeam cuts the air; a sapphire light
Rolls lazily, and slips again to rest.
There is no edged thing in all this night,
Save in my breast.
July 28, 2021
I’ve read more about Dorothy Parker than actually written by her, so when I found this little book of poetry in a used bookstore, I was excited. Sadly, these poems weren’t that accessible. Her wit came across in a few, but most of them were just difficult to follow.
June 12, 2022
Parker may not have been the greatest poet ever to use a typewriter, but her work is always readable and fun. Her gift for finding new ways to say just a few things amazes and amuses me. I really like this book.
December 27, 2023
4.5. favorite poem is The Ladies Reward(a new favorite poem). others i loved were Prayer for a new mother, the little old lady in lavender silk, tombstones in the starlight, solace, and the danger of writing defiant verse
January 25, 2025
“Any lad was born untrue,
Never a one is fit your weeping.”
Just like death and taxes, it’s all inevitable.
I picked this up by chance at a used bookstore. I wish I could have met Dorothy Parker because this poetry felt like she’s just one of the girls.
Never a one is fit your weeping.”
Just like death and taxes, it’s all inevitable.
I picked this up by chance at a used bookstore. I wish I could have met Dorothy Parker because this poetry felt like she’s just one of the girls.
December 10, 2020
Dorothy Parker is a gem. I heart everything she wrote.
May 1, 2021
Sad, you can tell this is written by someone at the end of their life.
October 30, 2021
The Flaw in Paganism
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall!
(But, alas, we never do.)
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall!
(But, alas, we never do.)
March 12, 2022
Rating - 3.5, rounded off to 3.
March 2, 2023
He never weaves a glinting lie,
or brags the hearts he’ll keep.
I have forgotten how to sigh-
Remembered how to sleep.
or brags the hearts he’ll keep.
I have forgotten how to sigh-
Remembered how to sleep.
July 19, 2023
What a hilarious, timeless, poignant little book of poetry. I quote it often!
October 30, 2023
CHERRY WHITE
I never sce that prettiest thing-
A cherry bough gone white with Spring-
But what I think, How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.
I never sce that prettiest thing-
A cherry bough gone white with Spring-
But what I think, How gay 'twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.
March 5, 2021
3 1/2 stars
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews