GARBAGE DELIGHT

The title poem goes down easily enough and ""The Tickle Tiger"" is sure to garner its share of laughs, but many of Dennis Lee's latest inventions (""A Jersey cow exploded/ One sunny summer's day"") are more in the nature of outlandish burlesques than inspired nonsense, while some are conventional, old-time juvenile jingles: ""I'm not exactly big,/ And I'm not exactly little,/ But being Five is best of all/ Because it's in the middle,"" (The worst are the unimaginative, unrhythmical parodies like ""The Big Blue Frog and the Dirty Flannel Dog."") All of them, it's true, would probably sound better if the book were more appealing to look at--for our taste, the pictures are overstyled and excruciatingly colored.