BOOK REVIEW / Bookshop Window: Monster poems, compiled by John Foster: Oxford, pounds 1.50.

One of a series of slender, bargain-priced anthologies - see also Twins Poems and Giant Poems. The monsters are jaunty and not remotely scary, and apart from a right-on save-the-whale verse they have a nice amount of cheek. The book even runs to limericks:

A sea-serpent saw a big tanker

Bit a hole in her side and then sank her.

It swallowed the crew

In a minute or two

And then picked its teeth with the anchor

The collection of twins poetry is perhaps more pleasing, since its subject is more oblique and comic. Here, too, twinship emerges as a mixed blessing:

We're hard to pull apart

We stick to each other like glue.

I gave her mumps and measles,

She gave me a dose of her flu.