Garbage Delight

Dennis Lee's Garbage Delight is a collection of nonsense poems for 5 year olds about sweaters that fight back, worms worth talking to and food you would not want on a plate.

What happens

The title poem is a boast. The narrator can manage a bun, can cope with jelly, will force down ice cream if pushed. None of it compares to Garbage Delight.

"With a nip and a nibble, a drip and a dribble, a dollop, a walloping bite." Try reading that without your mouth joining in.

Most of these are short. Some are four lines and gone, like poor Peter the pilot who crashes a jumbo jet into Lake Ontario and gets his bottom wet.

Others are proper little stories. Inspector Dogbone catches a crook by the nose, and then the crook eats his own nose, and then eats the rest of himself, and the case disappears along with him.

They're written to be said out loud, and that's really the point of them. The rhythms pull you along. Children start joining in on the repeated lines without being asked, which is exactly what you want at this age.

There's one about being stuck halfway into a jumper with your head not through the neck hole, feeling "half way dead". Any parent who has wrestled a five year old into school uniform will laugh.

There's a tickling rhyme, Skindiver, that heads for the toes and then the tummy and then bedtime. There's a girl who grows a moustache and deals with it using the garden shears. There's a boy whose only news from a whole seaside trip is that he had a strawberry soda.

The tone runs from silly to almost soothing, so you can pick one to wind them up or one to wind them down.

Two small things. The poet is Canadian, so a few of the rhymes lean on names your reader won't know, Saskatchewan and Stanley Park and Corner Brook among them. They scan beautifully anyway and nobody has ever needed a map to enjoy a nonsense poem.

And the humour is happily rude in places. Bums, tums, burps and a fly drowning in your soup. If that's the sort of thing that sets your household off, expect it quoted at the dinner table for a fortnight.

What to read next

For more of the same, his Alligator Pie is in the library too. Billy Batter has lost his cat in the laundromat, a dragon has run off with his dad, and it only gets sillier from there.