Matthew Sweeney is much more than a fun poet providing light digressions for children. His poems are unarguably tender and humorous; they also probe the darkness. He remembers what it was like to be a boy, endowed with insight and innocence, yet hopelessly, even gladly, vulnerable to a lunatic adult world. In the title poem of his new collection, Fatso in the Red Suit, the errant father does return to the boy whose chaotic Christmas dreams spin the thread that binds them, and poems like “My Party” are unashamed and exuberant fantasies. Elsewhere, however, in “Only the Wall” and “The New Boy” we are, at once, the victim and the bully, the insider and the new boy. This is not only a chance to consider our roles, but to broaden our sympathies. Values are not so much taught, as inculcated at the deepest level through the music of the word.

But this is not a sober collection. “Bubblebus”, for instance, provides a glimpse of hope for a future in which not only bubble buses but also the human spirit will soar above pollution and congestion. And then we know that it lies within our creative will to solve our problems. Neither is this a book for boys alone. “A Boy” addresses all bookworms; gender is irrelevant. There are more child bookworms than is commonly supposed and this poem makes it all right to be one.

First anthologies abound, but there is always a need for child-sized volumes like The Grasshopper Laughs which combine a thoughtful balance of the traditional with the new, the home-grown with other cultures. Rhymes from Russian, Eskimo, and Caribbean traditions sit happily beside our own.

Poems like Ted Hughes’s “Starfish” contain a sense of the numinous. Here the desperate longings that invade and lift the human spirit find their voice in the simple cadences of the mermaid who raised her eyes to the stars and believed if only she could weep enough to wash the salt from her eyes, “one of those dazzlerswould be me”. Similarly, W B Yeats’s “To an Isle in the Water” is as surely accessible to infant innocence as it is open to mature reflection.

The Last Thesaurus will make word addicts. In this story-poem Bert and Brunhilde Brontosaurus meet the Last Thesaurus whose way with words defeats Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is a book to dazzle and bewitch the young with the rolling, sonorous polysyllables of the dinosaur world. They will not understand. Instead they will discover at an intuitive level all the glory, colour and power of words. A suspension of understanding is not only permissible, it is the condition on which language growth depends. And at the end readers will have more than a fair idea of the story too. Therein lies the enchantment.

My fear was that there just might be a glossary. There is a glossary but it is not a crass appendix, a moment when the poet lost his nerve and decided to explain. It is “A Colossal Glossary” and an integral part of the text. Appropriately it ends: “so the meanings of all the restof the words in this book are buried in one, a treasurechest.” Our language is well served by this book.