Children's poetry anthologies are immensely important as treasure houses of new experiences and possibilities - so it is cause for rejoicing that this month sees the publication of The Oxford Book of Children's Poetry, edited by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Oxford Children's Books.
It is a fascinating collection with an exhilarating range of poems, from The Pied Piper of Hamelin through to works by Grace Nichols and Benjamin Zephaniah. There are over 250 pieces divided into eight sections, with poems of a similar subject matter clustered together. EE Cummings' wonderful maggie and milly and molly and may sits next to John Masefield's Sea-Fever, followed a page later by Billy Collins' Walking Across the Atlantic.
There are many poems here I remember reading as a child: Victorian triumphs of absurdity like Lewis Carroll's Father William, a work underpinned by a darkened humour and energy:
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough," Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"
I remember relishing the outrage of this. It is a sensibility that feeds directly into the asperities and colloquial toughness of Roald Dahl, represented here by Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf:
Poor Grandmamma was terrified "He's going to eat me up!" she cried. And she was absolutely right. He ate her up in one big bite.
It's also great to find Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. I remember being entranced by the music of this poem, the sense of melancholy in the sudden shortened line at the end of each stanza: "And this is why I sojourn here/ Alone and palely loitering,/ Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake/ And no birds sing."
But there's also a wide range of recent material: the bite of Roger McGough's sametimedotcom, the linguistic playfulness of Judith Viorst's That Old Haunted House and the disarming gusto of John Agard's Prayer to Laughter: "send us stitches in our sides/ shake us till the water reaches our eyes/ buckle our knees till we cannot stand".
What is disappointing in this new collection, however, are the illustrations. In black and white throughout, they feel restrained and low-key. This lack becomes particularly glaring when you compare the book with another anthology that has a similar range of poems, The Hutchinson Treasury of Children's Poetry, published in 1998 and edited by Alison Sage. Here the images are in a wonderful range of styles and colours (51 different illustrators, as opposed to eight in the Oxford book). The spacing in the Hutchinson also feels more generous, and each page, with its different layout, comes as a surprise and is much more evocative as a result.
The role illustrations play in children's books is central and fascinating. I remember that when I began to read poetry, the pictures were an essential part of the experience, conjuring the atmosphere and the world of the poem. They provoked your curiosity and drew you in. My mother had an old copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, but far more appealing to me was a battered illustrated anthology (whose name I have sadly forgotten). I can still remember the excitement of the drawings that accompanied Walter de la Mare's The Listeners and Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott, the way that the experiences of looking and reading were intertwined.
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