There aren’t too many titles left in my family’s adventure through Roald Dahl’s bibliography (for children), and this book of poems was a pleasant one to preserve towards the end. It’s silly and magical, but in a way that only Dahl can pull off. Even with the cutesy animals and silly themes, there’s also a great deal of death and killing that provide a dark tinge to the humor. We’ve grown to like it that way.

The “dirty beasts” in this book are almost all creatures you know (from pigs to crocodiles to scorpions and anteaters), though there are also some you’ve probably never heard of (like the magic toad or the Tummy Beast). Whether they’re real animals or not doesn’t really matter, because each is personified and many can talk, and virtually all have a deep-seated dislike for humankind. And that’s where the killing comes in.

The 9 poems in this book vary in length from 18 lines to 180. They follow the same exact meter and rhythm and are super simple to read out loud—unless you’ve got an American accent like me, in which case, you’ll probably stumble over a few rhymes. I say this last bit because of my favorite lines, which come from the fifth poem, “The Ant-eater” in which Dahl writes this parenthetical note:

(Some people in the U.S.A.
Have trouble with the words they say.
However hard they try, they can’t
Pronounce a simple word like AUNT.
Instead of AUNT, they call it ANT,
instead of CAN’T, they call it KANT.)

That section caught me off guard a bit, and although I had to re-read it to make sure I was working with a (lame) British accent, I loved it and had a new favorite poem to try and memorize. The last one I memorized was 2 decades ago: “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” by Ogdan Nash. Definitely worth reading!

This whole book was a fun little collection of poems highly reminiscent of Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. It also contains some cameo appearances from The Enormous Crocodile himself and the Roly-poly Bird (from the same book—not my favorite) and a few, very faint morals-of-the-stories.

This was a fun and quick book to read aloud to the kids, and I’ve used both it and Revolting Rhymes as good tide-over stories to read at night when my kids are having their friends sleep over. No use stopping the magic just because their friends are over! It’s a great time to give these friends a taste of this important ritual we have, to read together nightly and to enjoy these wonderful books as a family. We’re running thin on Dahl books now, though, so we’re looking forward to what the evenings have in store for us next!

©2023 E.T.

Read More from Roald Dahl:

• Adult Short Stories:
  Over to You (1946)
  Someone Like You (1953)
  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977)
  
• Children Fiction:
  James and the Giant Peach (1961)
  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
  The Magic Finger (1964)
  Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
  Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
  Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
  The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
  The Twits (1980)
  George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981)
  The BFG (1982)
  Dirty Beasts (1983)
  Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
  The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me (1985)
  Going Solo (1986)
  Matilda (1988)
  Esio Trot (1990) 
  The Minpins (1991)
  The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)