cover image Child's Garden of Weirdness

Child's Garden of Weirdness

Dick Gautier. Tuttle Publishing, $14.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8048-1825-4

This puerile collection of verse aims for MAD Magazine -style humor, but for the most part winds up being merely tasteless. Although some of Gautier's subjects (messy rooms, fear of the dark, why dinosaurs are extinct) are benign enough, he often relies on scatological references. This, for instance, from a poem entitled ``Gerald,'' about a boy whose chief source of delight is in disgusting others: ``He used most of his bodily fluids / To do things I cannot mention / Well he didn't feel smart or funny / How else could he get attention?'' And then there's Buford, the overachieving feline who proudly presents his family with several dead rodents, then a dead horse and, finally, a cadaver from the morgue (``No odor thank goodness, however the face was grayish blue''). Many of the poems scan awkwardly (``Marguerite was petite and quite sweet / But boy did she have big feet / It seemed that everyone she met, / wouldn't let her forget / The enormity of her deformity''). Gautier provides similarly unaccomplished caricatures; an actor, he is perhaps best known for his performances in Broadway's Bye Bye Birdie and TV's Get Smart . All ages. (July)