Dublin’s Lesser Spotted Creatures

Irish children’s poets are thin on the ground, which issurprising, as Ireland is not exactly short on poets. It has fallen to poet Paul Tubb to get to grips with the capital city – in a decidedly whimsical fashion.

Dublin’s Lesser Spotted Creatures, Tubb’s second book, unleashes a bestiary of strange and often fabulous animals on Dublin’s familiar environs. Readers are introduced to an odd-sock-wearing orang-utan, an insect with its own web page, an ironing iguana, and many other beasts even less probable. I laughed out loud at the poem about Welsh prawns holidaying in Dublin, and at the bespectacled badger.

Tubb locates the outlandish in the mundane and has an eye for the quirky and unusual. The book can be a bit clunky –this may not be for connoisseurs of poetry – and the overall design is similarly basic. The often comically naïve drawings by the author certainly enhance the general air of silliness, and ultimately it is the humour that wins out, compensating for these defects.