Given the creative leaps post-modern poetry, a vegetarian vampire should not surprise anybody. "Bitey the Veggie Vampire" is the elegy which begins this collection of weird poems for wacky children. Here's a sample:

While his vampire friends ran wild in the dark
Bitey could not find his niche,
As they bit necks and ate human flesh,
Bitey just fancied some quiche.

More up-to-the-minute still is this verse from Nigel and Frank:

Nigel the frog was in need of a snog
To turn him into a prince.
But it wasn't a joke that he had a high croak
And walked with a bit of a mince.

A friend snatched them up and read them out to me, one after the other, chuckling to herself. She assured me: "A little boy of the right age and sense of humour would love this stuff."

Today's boys and girls too will delight in the book's essential environmental lessons and the infants' liberation message in "Babies" will raise a smile. They can also ponder on the bleak ecological forecasts of "Dragon for Hire" - the dragon sets fire to everything in sight.

Derby's Chris White has been writing these verses ("scribbling" he calls it) over the last 15 years.