A gifted vocalist, Natalie Merchant is a tastemaker whose songs have provided a soundtrack for our times. In 1987 with the band 10,000 Maniacs and their terrific album In My Tribe, she introduced what might be termed Yankee Grunge; everything about it seemed to say Northampton and English Major. Then, in Tigerlily (1995) and Ophelia (1998), Merchant embarked on her solo career and, as these titles suggest, turned to feminism; the album photos of Merchant even seem to present reincarnations of Emily Dickinson. Her next phase came in 2001 with Motherland. Now, after a seven-year hiatus and with a seven-year-old daughter, Merchant has released this work of lullabies and children’s poems.

More Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child’s Garden of Verses) than Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends), Leave Your Sleep is, as Merchant says, full of stories about “witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a janitor’s boy.” If you hear calliope music at this point, you’re not far off; the sounds that fill this album include dulcimers, fiddles, uilleann pipes, concertinas, and penny whistles. In truth, however, the work is a Whitman’s Sampler of styles (Celtic, Klezmer, Cajun, reggae, ragtime, bluegrass) and performers (Lúnasa, the Klezmatics, Wynton Marsalis).

For the most part, the poems here are not au courant, though there are a few twentieth-century selections: E. E. Cummings’s “maggie and milly and molly and may” (where he takes delight in the euphony of those names), Jack Prelutsky’s street chant of flavors in “Bleezer’s Ice-Cream” (which owes a debt to Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”), and Rachel Field’s “Equestrienne” (which recalls William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the poem’s imagistic fascination with “the girl in pink on the milk-white horse”). In the main, however, Merchant’s chosen poems comfortably reside in the nineteenth century, and the accompanying small hardcover book, containing the complete texts of the poems, features author photos of men with handlebar mustaches and women with three names (such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney). Theirs was an era when Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” was considered suitable childhood reading.

While apparently miscellaneous, this collection reveals a specific taste: in the shorthand of reviews, “Christina Rossetti meets Mother Goose.” Here are Gilded Age poems that tell stories (Charles E. Carryl’s “The Sleepy Giant”) and specimens of nonsense (Edward Lear’s “Calico Pie”) as well as five poems by that remarkable writer Anon., who, as Pamela Travers once observed to me, has an amazingly uniform style.

Equally interesting are biographical accounts of the authors that appear in the book. We learn that Robert Louis Stevenson visited a leper colony in Hawaii and decided to give them the piano he was bringing to his Samoan destination, and that Albert Bigelow Paine (“The Dancing Bear”) had a bear-sized crush on Mark Twain. Most interesting is the story about child prodigy Nathalia Crane who, at the age of eleven, published “The Janitor’s Boy” — the poem that inspired Merchant’s best song in the collection:

Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
And the janitor’s boy loves me;
He’s going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

A desert isle with spicy trees
Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;
A right nice place, just fit for two
Where we can live alway.

Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
He’s busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he’s making a raft
Out of an old settee.

He’ll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.

The day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,
For my parents I hate to annoy:
“I have flown away to an isle in the bay
With the janitor’s red-haired boy.”

Taken altogether, this offering by Natalie Merchant evokes a special mood and vision of parenting. Even as I write this, in early June in Southern California, the air is brisk with the smells of September — and somewhere in rural New England, a mother and her young daughter, in matching OshKosh overalls, stand on a stone or wooden floor, stirring lentil soup while Celtic tunes play in the background.

Leave Your Sleep
by Natalie Merchant
All Ages    Nonesuch Records    4/10
2 CDs (26 songs)     $28.98

Selections from the Album Leave Your Sleep
by Natalie Merchant
All Ages    Nonesuch Records    4/10
1 CD (16 songs)    $18.98

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