CHILDREN'S POETRY:From Shakespeare to a re-issued Ted Hughes, to a witty debut from a new Irish poet - the year's best children's poetry
Classic Poetry
Selected by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Paul Howard (Walker, £9.99)
So what is "Classic" poetry? Rosen's selection of some 80 poems ranges chronologically from Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Manto Judith Wright's Full Moon Rhymewith, in between, an excellent range of writing from England, Scotland, America, Australia, Ireland – and much further afield.
Howard’s illustrations are rich, imaginative and colourful, all of them enhancing the texts of the poems.
New and Collected Poems for Children
By Carol Ann Duffy, illustrated by Alice Stevenson (Faber, £16.99)
This handsomely produced volume comprises Duffy’s four previous collections for children, supplemented by a generous selection of new work. It demonstrates immediately that the British Poet Laureate writes as entertainingly, as thoughtfully and as “seriously” for children as she does for adults: there is no sense of condescension or of needing to peddle the second rate in order to gain children’s interest.
Instead, in just under 300 pages, she deals with an impressive range of themes and forms, all of them linked by an engaging intelligence and, in many cases, by an equally engaging sense of fun.
The Mona Lisa’s on our Fridge
By Alan Murphy (AvantCard Publications, £12.50)
An Irish children's poet makes his debut with an eye-catching and ear-bending collection – and provides the colourfully and appropriately surreal collage illustrations as well. Encompassing such subjects as The Alien Binmen, The Devil's Hot Water Bottleand Funk and Jazz, Murphy's poems are diverting journeys into the sort of imaginative realm we might associate with a Picasso or a Chagall, both of whom are referenced here: "So doff your hat but hold on to your head; / Just lose your logical limits instead". The wonderfully liberating consequences of an abandonment of these "logical limits" are wittily delineated in Murphy's poems.
Timmy the Tug
By Ted Hughes, illustrated by Jim Downer (Thames Hudson, £12.95)
Dating from the early 1950s and only recently rediscovered, this decidedly quaint volume reproduces Hughes’s original typewritten text for a poem which relates how a tug boat, initially beset by its sense of inadequacy, eventually finds itself and its place among apparently more glamorous craft.
An “Afterword” by Downer affectionately reconstructs the genesis of the poem, while his artwork, beautifully evocative of its period, combines with the text to provide a fascinating addendum to the existing body of Hughes’s work for children. There will, however, also be many adults attracted nostalgically to what no doubt will become a collector’s item.
Umpteen Pockets
By Adrian Mitchell, illustrated by Tony Ross (Orchard, £14.99)
“I dreamed I was back in the playground, I was about four feet high . . .”.
Mitchell's most widely anthologised poem, Back in the Playground Blues, with its searing memories of "The Killing Ground" that served as its narrator's school yard, will be found here, in a volume which serves as a worthy memorial to a poet who died in December of last year.
Generally, though, Mitchell’s prevailing tone is more light-hearted, many of his poems deriving from close observation of children and their idiosyncratic view of the world.
