Children Love Poetry

Children are a natural audience for poetry. Sound, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, metre - it's all playful, and play is a child's medium. So it's not surprising that children love poetry. Breakfast times in our house are sometimes accompanied by the soundtrack of Little Boy reeling off jokes from a giant joke book. Can be torturous. Recently though, this has been replaced by limericks from his Edward Lear compendium - he cracks up after every one, and listening to "There was a young lady whose chin/ resembled the point of a pin..." is much more easy on the ears than the latest offering from the Bumper Book of Kids' Jokes Volume III. Limericks seem to appeal to his sense of the absurd, and satisfy an instinctive need for rhythm and rhyme. Within a day of getting the book, he had raced up to his room, found pen and paper and attempted a couple of his own. Any book that inspires children to create spontaneous poetry has to be a winner.




One of my own favourites as a child was Spike Milligan's nonsense verse. Even now I'd find it hard to resist a poem which starts "On the Ning Nang Nong where the cows go bong". There's something deliciously subversive about these poems, too. Often the target of a poem is a usually-esteemed adult: "Through every nook an every cranny/The wind blew in on poor old granny." Cue lots of sniggers. And of course, these poems beg to be read aloud, which enriches the joy of playful language.

Another read-aloud favourite here is Dr Seuss's Oh Say Can You Say with it's one-after-the-other, increasingly-tricky tongue twisters, accompanied by gloriously bizarre illustrations, and peopled by characters such as the Fuddnuddler Brothers, "who like to pile each on the heads of the others." More than once, this book's been whipped from my hands with an excited "Can I read it?" Far more fun than The Cat In The Hat

But it doesn't all have to be silly stuff. The most beloved book here contains a collection of poets that include Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Blake, Byron, Ted Hughes, Larkin, Longfellow, Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Wordsworth and WB Yeats. It's a children's collection, but not a worthy one. The chosen poems are not the usual suspects, and range from tiny couplets to longer narrative poems. There's a range of tone too, with one starting "Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth-Toast/ Bought an old castle complete with a ghost", and another, "The two executioners stalk along..." (Hardy of course - what did you expect!) It's The Usborne Book Of Poetry, a book of exquisite loveliness. In every childhood, it seems, there is a well-remembered book that is more than just the sum of its contents. It is usually hardbacked, with pages that crackle when you turn them, and pictures so vivid, or so whimsical, that you're immediately transported to that world. Often too, it seems, the content is strange and maybe just out of intellectual reach - a book which promises some treasures yet to come, a world of possibilities just beyond understanding. This is such a book. Its beautiful tactile cover is the colour of Wedgewood china, and embossed with looped silver writing and fern leaves. In the centre is an oval of colour - a painted tiger, looking straight into the reader's eyes and enticing you to enter. Inside, beyond the bright yellow endpapers, each slightly glossy page is washed with colour, and brought to life by magical illustrations that have an other-worldly quality. It feels like a book found in an old junk shop in a story about magic and adventure. As an object it is magical, and as an anthology it opens a world of mystery, tomfoolery and wonderful wordplay. Children love poetry, and with poetry books as fabulous as these, there's a whole lotta lovin' going on.