Sing-Song: a nursery rhyme book

Christina Rossetti, the poet behind the haunting "Goblin Market," turns her considerable gifts toward the smallest listeners in this collection of 126 nursery rhymes. Here are poems about babies and bouncing, about crickets and crown imperial, about all the small wonders that fill a child's world. The verses have the simple pleasures of traditional rhymes but carry Rossetti's distinctive musicality, her uncanny ability to capture exactly how things look to young eyes. Some are lullabies. Some are little dramas of tickle and chase. All of them move with the rolling, skipping rhythm that makes children lean in close, eager for the next word. Published in 1872, Sing-Song has been comforting and delighting generations of readers for over a century. It's for parents who want to share real poetry with the children they love, not just sanitized verses but actual poems that happen to welcome the youngest ears.