Nonsense verse has a ready appeal for most young children, and ever since the publication of Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie, Canadian poets have produced many fun rhymes for families to chant and chuckle over. Mama Likes to Mambo is a first collection of verse by Torontonian Helaine Becker. While her subjects and tone may not be to everyone’s taste, the verses are jaunty, cheerful, and sometimes evocative: “Hot rocks, bleached docks, sandy toes with no socks,/Stir the soul of summer/Down by the bay.” Other poems have a message, such as that of reassuring parental love in “Who Stole the Baby?” and “Hurricane Hissy.”

The nonsense element is reinforced by illustrator John Beder’s use of dressed-up animals rather than human characters. While most of these pictures suit the tone and subject matter, the use of polar bears in “Who Stole the Baby?” creates confusion: the poem implies, rather than states directly, that the baby gets lost in the process of growing up, but the change from baby to child isn’t clear in the pictures since he’s always just a little polar bear.

Becker uses a variety of verse forms and rhythms. In “Popsicle,” the letters drip down the page as the frozen treat melts off its stick, and “The Small Round Poem” and “The Tall Thin Poem” are printed in typefaces appropriate to the titles. While expressing the fun of sounds and rhymes, these verses sometimes falter in rhythm, and fall short of the perfect, inevitable-sounding word combinations that are the joy of great nonsense verse.