Pulitzer Prize poet Marianne Moore wrote to Ogden Nash about a book by him: "I thought I'd put a little mark on each page I really treasure, and they all have little marks." Four decades later I've marked page after page to treasure - for the skill of the friendly first-time biographer as well as the delights of the poet - in Douglas Parker's "Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse."

Moore wrote in 1962, the year Nash lunched with journalists in Boston on a national lecture tour. The quiet master of wordplay told us he hoped to "unruffle" or perhaps "gruntle" those who were disappointed at stops he had canceled earlier because of illness. It was a moment in tune with the setbacks and resilience that come alive in this book with the aid of published and unpublished writings, family cooperation, and wide research.

Nash could make $400 for 20 lines of verse in The New Yorker. He wrote nearly a hundred verses on the spot for buyers at a book signing in Oklahoma City.

He inscribed one of his books for Mary Wilson, wife of then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, after meeting her at a London dinner party. When her own book of poetry came out, Nash's inscription appeared in The New Statesman with his word "versifier" misprinted as "thirsty fire" (and this before computer spell checks allowed such things).

Typos happen. In this book New Statesman becomes New Statesmen, though it's correct in the index. But what would have bothered the meticulous Nash is the tin-eared substitution of "talk" for "pluck" in the last lines of "The Hunter":

This grown-up man, with pluck and luck,
Is hoping to outwit a duck.

No misprints here in Nash's best-known lines (from "Reflections on Ice-Breaking"): "Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker." Parker quotes Nash as relieved to find his first Christian Science audience (in St. Louis) "tumultuously enthusiastic, even in spite of dandy candy and reference to such non-existent things as itching and the common cold."

It's all in the context of Nash not only need- ing the money from lecturing but also taking satisfaction from audience approval. As early as 1936 he found he could make a living as a writer of light verse. That's news. But it was a constant scramble to do better than that. He contributed to magazines, recycled material for books, tried Hollywood, performed on radio and TV, wrote ads and Hallmark cards, read his words in "Carnival of the Animals" concerts (after he switched to actual animals from mischievous portraits of colleagues).

As a writer for children, Nash said he was "violently opposed to the trend in education today of trying to suit the books to the little mind instead of letting the little mind grow as it tackles the books."

In Boston, he wryly said, "I may have been writing for the 12-year-old mind all these years without knowing it."

Nash had done his share of twitting governmental, cultural, and corporate folly. But why write light verse anyway during the Depression and then World War II?

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