Children's Poetry: A look at new collections left Mary Shine Thompson wanting more.
In 1957, Sylvia Plath wrote that her poet-husband Ted Hughes "wants to make children's books his other field". He did, as at least 17 children's books of plays, poems and stories, and influential anthologies such as The Rattle Bag and The School Bag (co-edited by Seamus Heaney), affirm.
Odd, then, that Hughes's posthumous Collected Poems omitted most of his children's verse. Season Songs survived the cut, but Collected Poems' editor Paul Keegan described its verse tartly as children's poems "that grew up". Hughes believed in a children's "lingua franca to which adults could listen secretly". The 257 poems comprising Collected Poems for Children, illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Faber, £16.99), testify to its success and highlight a spurious breach, because Hughes's imaginative landscape accommodates all ages. His preoccupations, regardless of audience, are survival in a fallen world and nature red in tooth and claw.
In an uncompromising children's poetic universe, herons are "poised to stab"; geese "dirty queens, hating each other"; and the "futuristic design" of swallows reminiscent of warplanes. The mythic monsters of his moon-world include a sinister "flying strangler, the silent zero". But while his predominantly animal subject-matter leaves him open to charges of monotony, he avoids the uninflected nihilism of Crow and its comic-book overkill. Instead, wit and humour here jostle with unvarnished evil: an octopus is "'a tassel/Of hideous gristle"'; a predatory fox a jolly farmer.
I have some quibbles. The editor doesn't offer a rationale for excluding certain poems and including versions of others (the laureate was an inveterate reviser). It's extraordinary that the favourite of school syllabi, The Thought-Fox, is omitted. And the citation of collections is incomplete. But the choice of illustrator Raymond Briggs is inspired: his accomplished, mordant crayon drawings engage the poems in adroit, witty conversation.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice also is well served by illustrator Nicky Phelan in I'm Proud to be Me (Mercier Press, €7.99), probably Fitzmaurice's best children's book. Like Hughes, Fitzmaurice shapes up to unpalatable realities. But unlike Hughes, he sets his verse mainly in school. It's serious and knockabout in equal measure. Two distinct, assured voices are discernible, child's and teacher's. Teachers get good if understated press: they're warm, perceptive, attuned to their charges' struggles with loneliness and human misery. Youngsters aspire to "coolness": therein lies their vulnerability. Acutely observed story-poems address bullying, tiffs, and disability in an earthy idiom that's local to north Kerry and, because of that, as global as Patrick Kavanagh would wish.
"An everyday guide to poetic forms", the subtitle of Paul Janeczko's anthology, A Kick in the Head, (Candlewick Press, £12.99) suggests a passion killer, but Janeczko cannily draws on a sports analogy: knowing the rules adds to the fun. Those pesky poets, however, keep breaking them. Robert Service's ballad about Dan McGrew isn't in quatrains, and Steven Herrick confounds our expectations of the limerick's rhyme. Chris Raschka's collage-and-watercolour conveys clever pictorial clues. Useful definitions of forms - like the pantoum and the triolet - beckon readers discreetly from the margins.
The distinctive feature of Favourite Poems That Tell Stories: Once Upon a Time (foreword by Kevin Crossley-Holland, illustrated by Peter Bailey, Siân Bailey, Carol Lawson & Chris McEwan, The Chicken House, £7.99) is that celebs such as Phillip Pullman and JK Rowling champion its poems, blending the well-loved (Carroll's The Jabberwocky) and the arcane (Lear's The Children of the Owl and the Pussycat). The medley underlines what we know: lyric isn't the only form for children. Roger McGough's preface-poem sets a humorous tone: "If I was a poem/ I'd play football and/ get picked for England". Is Rowling being ironic when she praises Belloc's "understatement" in Jim Who Ran Away From his Nurse, and Was Eaten by a Lion? Is Goldilocks a "nasty thieving little louse"? Read and see.
Great stocking-fillers include Another Night Before Christmas, a luscious rewrite of Clement Moore's classic by Carol Ann Duffy (illustrated by Marc Boutavant, John Murray, £9.99). The coolest teenagers will warm to Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters's pacy verse novel Crash - "Too young. Too fast. Love and death. It happens." - (Hodder, £5.99) and to their anthology, Love, Hate and My Best Mate (Hodder, £5.99) in which Marvell vies with Brian Patten. Pity about the poor quality paper, though.
Brian Moses canters through British history in Blood and Roses: British History in Poetry (illustrated by Chris Mould, Hodder £4.99) leaving me wanting more and other poems: I'd have included Derek Mahon's After the Titanic. The spider-eye's view of Robert the Bruce ("For a king he was really depressing/ . . . if spiders could groan, I'd have groaned") and Benjamin Zepheniah's rap (the Celts "were functional and pastoral/ And really quite exceptional") wake history into dance. Right on, poets!
Mary Shine Thompson is co-ordinator of research at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University. Her Treasure Islands: Studies in Children's Literature (co-edited by Celia Keenan) will be published shortly by Four Courts Press