`Poetry is fun. And it's good for you. It makes you laugh. It helps you cry." That's how Robert Dunbar and Gabriel Fitzmaurice launch their excellent, new anthology of poems, and they certainly prove their claim, in Rusty Nails and Astronauts (Wolfhound Press). There are nearly 200 poems, old and new, and from many lands, with bold and colourful illustrations by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick.
You'll find traditional rhymes in English and Irish, old favourites like The Owl and the Pussycat and Pangur Ban, as well as the best of modern writers such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Brendan Kennelly, and Julie O'Callaghan.
There are serious poems about sleep fears, growing old, running away from home, and bullying; rollicking poems, adventurous poems, many animal poems, and also the kind of quirky, zany verses that children love - like this one by Richard Edwards:
`I've lately discovered,' the Prof said to Ron,
`That monkeys are people with overcoats on.'
`But how do you know,' answered Ron to the Prof,
`That people aren't monkeys with overcoats off?'
One of the poets in that book, Roger McGough, has produced an anthology of his own, now in paperback, called The Ring of Words, (Faber and Faber, £8.99 in UK). Again there are poets from the past - Keats, Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson; and in the rest of the collection, Roger McGough goes a lot for the mysterious and magical, as well as for a great number of comic and crazy verses in which an elephant comes to tea, a poet raves about bananas, words hold a party, and a motorway is built specially for hedgehogs. There are amazing images, like this verse by Kit Wright:
Belly stuffed with dust and fluff, The hoover moos and drones, Grazing down on the carpet pasture:
Cow with electric bones.
With a title like The Worst Class in the School (Poolbeg, £3.99) it's not surprising that Colin Fletcher's book of poems features some topics which children will find hilarious even if they make parents wince - among them smells, spots, bogeys, graffiti, and practical jokes. There are 26 poems with a bunch of characters who range alphabetically from eye-rolling, double-jointed Amazing Amelia to sleepy Zzzz Zoe. In between we meet Creepy Chrissy, Exploding Ed, and rich and boastful Flashy Floyd, who gets his comeuppance in the final verse:
"Coo, Floyd! Your parents are loaded!
They buy the best! The tops!
But YOU were on special offer
From one of those reject shops!"
There's Ketchup Kelly who has sauce with everything, because "Salmon quiche is really ghastly! It tastes of poo and stinks of parsley!" We also meet Tell-Tale Tara, "the most famous Liar in the Universe" and Oinky Ollie who eats banana sandwich, cold Christmas pudding and curried cod and chips all at once.
The title poem in Steve Turner's new book, Dad, You're Not Funny (Lion, £8.99 in UK) is an awful warning from child to father: please don't tell me and my mates jokes, recall your days at school, show babyhood videos, do impressions, perform dances or give hugs. It's just one of a lively collection of entertaining child's-viewpoint poems with subjects including shoes, ghosts, Christmas, shopping, families, friends, and a delightful one with the great opening line: "In the days before computers, we had mud . . ."
I was very pleased to see that some of the poems of one of my own favourite writers, Stevie Smith, have been collected in a book for young readers, Our Bog is Dood (Faber, £4.99 in UK) Here are many of her magical, topsy-turvy characters like the happy frog who didn't want to be turned into a prince, the galloping cat, the happy dragon, and the girl whose hat flies her to a desert island. It includes that great melancholy lyric which begins:
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.
Gordon Snell is a children's author.
