Read Me 1: A Poem For Every Day Of The Year Book

Like the bottle labelled DRINK ME in Alice in Wonderland, the cover of Macmillan's anthology of poems for children produced for The National Year of Reading, (1999), features the words READ ME attractively inscribed in red writing on a brown tie-on label. And just like in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, the consumers of this book are in for a surprise. This is no ordinary poetry anthology for children. Certainly, the poems are ordered in relation to the seasons, and the school year, but they are of very different kinds, written by quite different kinds of poets and for widely different readers. The quality of the writing is very variable too; the 'classic' poems generally being of a much higher literary quality than more contemporary verse. Spike Milligan and Dr Seuss sit next to Robert Browning, Yeats and Shakespeare. But then accessibility and enjoyment seem to have been the keywords in choosing the modern poems. A challenging concept and a rag-bag of poems containing some real jewels. (Ages 8 to 13) --Tamsin PalmerRead More