There once was an author from East Meadow

Michael Croland loves limericks so much that in 2016 he proposed to his wife Tamara with one. Now, six years later, the East Meadow resident is publishing a book full of them.

“There Once Was a Limerick Anthology” was published on Aug. 17 by Dover Publications of Garden City. The book is filled with 350 selected limericks, five- line rhyming poems with a bouncy rhythm.

“It’s a fun, smoothly flowing form of poetry,” said Croland, 38, a fan of limericks for nearly a decade. “I’ve read through a lot of old Limerick anthologies just for fun, and I saw an opportunity to publish a new anthology with a different spin.”

The anthologies came from a ton of research, Croland said. Most were published at least 100 years ago and were in public domain. Many of the entries in his anthology come from the limerick “golden age.”

“The golden age of the limerick is recognized from being the early 1820s through 1928,” he said.

“This variety of poetic form has been entertaining audiences for centuries,” Susan Rattiner, editorial supervisor at Dover, wrote to the Herald, “and this volume is a worthy addition to our collection of Dover Thrift Edition poetry anthologies.”
At the end of Croland’s book, however, are more recent limericks. “(The epilogue) is a way to talk about some things that they weren’t talking about centuries ago,” he said. “Like organic food, Spanglish, diversity, and even the Macarena.”
Croland’s marriage proposal was anything but romantic poetry.

“Michael’s proposal with a limerick was more personalized — and quirky — than a typical proposal,” his wife, Tamara Croland, wrote to the Herald. “It ended with ‘Will you marry me?’ so I said yes. It wasn’t surprising when he went all-in on the quirkiness of limericks and decided to put together an anthology a few years later.”

The idea for his anthology started in March 2021. He submitted the manuscript for the book in December 2021. He works as a book editor at Dover, but this project is unrelated to his job.

Croland said he likes limericks because they appeal to different types of people with a dual approach. “It appeals to humor buffs because of the humor and it appeals to poetry lovers, because it is poetry,” he said.

Croland began writing poetry as a teenager and started writing limericks about eight years ago. He’s written over a thousand, but joked that less than a hundred of them are decent.

His first book, “Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk” was published in 2016 by Praeger Publishers, an Imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group in Connecticut. The book explores the connection between Jews and punk rock music. His next three books, “Punk Rock Hora: Adventures in Jew-Punk Land,” “Air to the Throne: A Poetry Chapbook about Air Guitar,” and “Celtic Punk Superfan: Recaps and Reflections Chapbook 2002-22,” were self-published in 2019, 2020, and 2022, respectively.

Croland said he enjoys the connection between punk and limericks. “As much as punk is about do it yourself, create your own rules, it tends to be three chord three minute songs,” he said. “I find that analogous to limericks in a way because limericks have that short space to work with fixed parameters.”

The target audience for this particular book, he said, is humor buffs and poetry lovers. “I just want people to enjoy it and laugh,” he said.