Colin McNairn

Signs of the Times Colin McNairn

Signs of the Times is good clean-or not so clean-fun in two ways. It's a joy to be reintroduced to so many dearly loved and justly renowned nursery rhymes, long after their sparkle and pungency may have faded from adult memory. It's also fun to see what an informed and somewhat sardonic modern sensibility makes of them anew in the context of these times we are all now living through.


-Bruce Bennett, Emeritus Professor of English, Wells College


Colin McNairn is clearly having fun as he rewrites nursery rhymes to comment on the wider world. With jabs and plentiful jokes ("hickory, dickory, daiquiri"), he happily draws readers into his imaginative wordsmithery.


-Warren Clements, Author, The Nestlings Press Book of Fairy Tales in Verse


If Mother Goose were writing her nursery rhymes to-day, she would no doubt
burnish her MeToo credentials by condemning Georgie Porgie for kissing the girls and making them cry,
have Billy Boy, a.k.a. Charming Billy, look for a wife online rather than by pursuing a ground game;
warn us against catching a tiger by the toe, given the dangers of nail fungus; and
recognize a twinkle, twinkle in the night sky as more likely to evidence a drone rather than a star.
These are among the revisionist scenarios portrayed in the 70 plus mature verses in this collection, all of which have been inspired, to some extent, by traditional nursery rhymes. The subject matter of the verses ranges widely and includes, politics, language, the law, dating and mating, social behavior, food and drink, health, sports, commerce, technology, travel, and the natural environment.