I teach the older kids at the centre where I work all varieties of poetry - Christina Rossetti to Pablo Neruda, Poe to T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare to Fleur Adcock to e.e. cummings to Dylan Thomas to Carol Ann Duffy to Louise Gluck, and a whole lot inbetween - and have been looking into stuff for the young ones - Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Spike Milligan, a few others - so I was really happy to find a contemporary book of kids' poetry that wasn't sappy or saccharine. However, the book has not lived up to my hopes. 
 I've been trying to read these aloud today with the plan of reading them with the young kids later, but I'm finding it impossible. While I enjoy the subject matter, and can see how it appeals to a lot of kids, the poetry is almost without rhythm - or at least if there is any, I have yet to find it. With all the different writers that I teach, I'm used to having to read pieces many times to get a feel for the way it should sound (particularly with Duffy, Cummings and Gluck), but I found only two or three poems in this entire book that I would be able to read aloud even after a lot of practice. To me, they don't seem to have any structure whatsoever - they're just puddles of words. 
 (I did enjoy "Sir Albert And His Dragon".) 
 So I guess this one just doesn't work for me. Other readers have enjoyed it, so I suppose it's more a stylistic clash than anything. *shrugs*