Dramas in miniature, scripts for soothing a cranky baby, subversive vehicles of protest, found poems, challenges, invitations to dance and song – nursery rhymes are one of the great gifts of the language. In this country we are rich in illustrated nursery rhyme collections. Barbara Reid’s Sing a Song of Mother Goose with its funny and good-natured Plasticine illustrations has long been one of my standard new baby gifts. Groundwood’s Mother Goose: A Canadian Sampler has illustrations from a wide variety of our illustrators and shows the huge range both of our artists and of possible interpretations of these small poems. Sandra Carpenter-Davis’s modestly produced Bounce Me, Tickle Me, Hug Me includes rhymes from a variety of languages and shows by real-life contemporary examples the power of these rhymes to create connections between parents, children, and communities.

Joining this distinguished company is Kady MacDonald Denton’s A Child’s Treasury of Nursery Rhymes. My first reaction on hearing of Kady MacDonald Denton and nursery rhymes in the same phrase was “Well, of course.” Denton’s soft-edged watercolour technique, her gift for portraying the grace and solidity of small children, her mastery of composition and, most of all, the non-cloying warmth and sweetness she brings to moments between adults and children – she seems like a Mother Goose natural.

I wasn’t disappointed. This 145-poem collection is indeed a treasury. It is big, good value for the poetry dollar. It is innovatively designed. It is varied. And if you can browse through it, encountering its joyous dancing children, its fat men in the bath, and its bashful lovers, without smiling, then you are a certifiable grump.

Denton’s choice of rhymes seems to reveal the book’s real-life origins. Families end up making their own contribution to the nursery rhyme canon. I know one dad who often soothed his too-tired son by dancing him around the room singing “Wake Up, Little Susie.” I myself was a hit in kindergarten because of my ability to recite the description from the back of the Crest toothpaste tube. Looking at Denton’s illustration to “Skip to My Lou,” I was happily reminded of a preschool group I once knew who invented their own verses: “Slime on the stereo, yuck-oh-pooh.” Advertising jingles, Beatles songs, original nonsense, it all becomes part of the oral stew. And Denton creates her own very original collection by including poetry by Edward Lear, Rose Fyleman, and Robert Burns. She also includes songs and vaudeville turns: “Ladies and Jellypots, I come before you, not behind you.” This collection has the flavour of a set of genuine individual family choices.

Nursery rhyme collections also present a challenge in terms of arrangement; the trick is not to be bitty. Denton organizes the collection in four parts that are roughly chronological. Baby-dandling rhymes are followed by toddler-interest material with lots of animals, and then by schoolyard rhymes, and finally by “All Join In,” which includes games, riddles, and courtship rhymes. There is a wealth of material to take you all through childhood and, in the case of the adult reader, back again.

The design is lively, achieving unity and variety. The ship and whale illustration for the lullaby “Hush the waves are rolling in” is particularly lovely; single rhymes are illustrated on double spreads, groups of rhymes are arranged thematically about a single illustration; some rhymes are in boxes; and some rhymes run across the top of the page with accompanying cartoons.

One of the delights of nursery rhymes lies in their portrait of humankind in all its diversity. Denton captures this range delightfully. The neglected lover in “Oh dear, what can the matter be” looks right royally furious. Denton’s interpretation of the “old man clothed all in leather” is of a courtly street person, shy and gallant. The baby in “Jerry Hall, he is so small” is a real scrinched-up newborn. Denton captures whole situations in one gesture. The father in “Hush little baby” is holding a baby who is in one of those rigid-arm arched-back fits. Father hasn’t a clue what to do. Thus the desperate offer of a diamond ring. In fact, there are a number of portraits of loving but exhausted parents.

Denton never tries to be too clever but occasionally she brings a whole new slant to the story. Her Wee Willie Winkie is a baby who has escaped from his cot and is running through a town of toys and blocks. Her Jack and Jill are Siamese kittens who are overconfident about their climbing abilities. The old woman in a shoe is a mouse.

Sometimes Denton’s interpretations are elaborate. “A Apple Pie” includes a cast of animal characters, one for each letter of the alphabet. More often, and I think, more successfully, her “stories” are very simple. “There once were two cats of Kilkenny, Each thought there was one cat too many; So they fought and they fit, And they scratched and they bit, Till instead of two cats there weren’t any.” Denton chooses to illustrate the aftermath of this episode. A small shy boy dressed in an argyle sweater glances sideways into a corner of the road where there is a heap of fur. We are catching him just at the moment when he realizes what he is seeing. The illustration is small, in a limited range of colours (but including Denton’s signature use of orange) and simply composed, but it contains a whole plot.

“Girls and boys come out to play, The moon is shining bright as day; Come with a whoop, And come with a call. Come with a good will, Or come not at all.” Denton has certainly obeyed the summons to play, with good will and a whoop. The call is contagious.