The Bloomsbury Book of Lullabies. By Belinda Hollyer and Robin Bell Corfield. Bloomsbury Children's Books. £5.99 in UK
The New Faber Book of Children's Verse. Edited by Matthew Sweeney. Faber and Faber. £16.99 in UK
Never Play Snap with a Shark: Poems chosen by John Foster. Macmillan. £3.99 in UK
The Horrible Headmonster: Poems chosen by Gaby Morgan. Macmillan. £1.95 in UK
It's good to find the babies catered for in books like The Bloomsbury Book of Lullabies, a beautifully illustrated, big paperback which has old favourites like `Dance to your daddy' and `I see the moon and the moon sees me', and also poems like Rudyard Kipling's lyrical `The White Seal's Lullaby', verses with numbers and with animal noises, and Clyde Watson's delightful `All tucked in and roasty toasty'.
Children of all ages, and adults too, will enjoy The New Faber Book of Children's Verse. Edited by Matthew Sweeney, it has poems by over 100 writers, including Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan, as well as the stalwarts, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Dr Seuss, whose poem is about Mrs McCave, who had 23 sons and named them all Dave.
There are W.B.Yeats poems, such as the haunting `Fiddler of Dooney', Ogden Nash's warning verses about the terrible fate of Jabez Dawes, the boy who laughed at Santa Claus, and Adrian Mitchell's wonderfully fierce poem about bullying, `Back in the Playground Blues', as well as his hilarious `The Gondoliers of Greenland'.
I also like particularly Michael Longley's poem:
It is Hallowe'en. Turnip Head
Will soon be given his face,
A slit, two triangles, a hole.
His brains litter the table top.
A candle stub will be his soul.
Hilaire Belloc has two of his cautionary tales in the book, the celebrated poem about Matilda "who told such Dreadful Lies, /It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes" - and the one about the appalling snob who eventually got his comeuppance: "Godolphin Home was Nobly Born; /He held the Human Race in Scorn . . ." It's such a wide-ranging collection that you could browse in it for hours.
The cautionary tale still thrives among contemporary writers, in John Foster's collection, Never Play Snap with a Shark. All kinds of colourful transformations lie in wait for foolish or disobedient children, as they find themselves turned into frogs, rabbits, vampires, or statues made of concrete or ice.
There is also apt retribution for modern-age children like the TV addict who finally gets sucked into the television set; and for the noisy computer-game fanatic, when the aliens he has been zapping arrive in a spaceship to deal with him.
And you can guess the sinister change that comes over the internet-surfer, Tom, who is rash enough to access the website www.dracula.co.
The Horrible Headmonster is a collection of poems published to mark World Book Day 2001. The poems are full of fantasy and fun, with characters like the child who knows he would win the gold medal if only Olympic sports included bubble-gum blowing, goggle-box watching, late-morning snoring and homework botching; and the Collector of Adjectives who stores them in sealed boxes until a brother's collection of exclamation marks explodes.
There are touching poems too, about burying a much-loved dog, rescuing a kitten from the roof, and discovering the ghosts of old dragons who come haunting the town. There's a poem telling how Cornish fishermen could know where they were in a fog, by scooping up a cupful of the sea and tasting it.
Finally, one which will appeal to all children is David Flarmer's `The Prime Minister is 10 Today':
This morning I abolished
Homework, detention and dinner ladies.
I outlawed lumpy custard, school mashed spuds
And handwriting lessons . . .
The list of new laws goes on: two-hour playtimes, punishment for grumpy teachers, only 10 minutes work in each hour, and clogs to be worn by teachers at all times, so they can be heard coming. Lastly, the young Prime Minister appeals for other ideas:
Come on, help me change a thing or two
Before we all grow up
And get boring.
Gordon Snell is a children's author. His book of animal poems, The Thursday Club, is published by Orion