The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse

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The world of children's poetry is as diverse and as miraculous as the human imagination itself, a land where owls and pussy-cats set to sea in beautiful pea-green boats, and tigers burn bright in the forests of the night. It embraces word play, parody, nonsense, lullaby, and elegy, and ranges
from brief nursery rhymes to long narratives. It can be utterly silly, but it also recognizes that if children's lives are full of wonder and delight, they are also fraught with worries, disappointments, and moments of sadness. The best children's poets come to terms with grief as well as joy. Now,
in The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse, Neil Philip has surveyed and mapped this delightfully protean landscape, in a book that spans some two hundred and fifty years, from Isaac Watts, the first true children's poet, to such classic figures as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and A. A. Milne, to
scores of contemporary writers, such as Richard Wilbur, Sandra Cisneros, and Jack Prelutsky.
The range of poems is remarkable. Young readers will find long narratives such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride and Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin as well as Mick Gowar's Rat Trap, a political satire that parodies Browning's poem. The book also includes many miniature gems, such as Ogden Nash's The Eel and Hughes Mearns's The Little Man . There is of course much zany verse, such as Hilaire Belloc's Jim, Who Ran Away from His Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion , Eugene Field's classic The Duel , and A.A. Milne's Disobedience . And Philip has also included many thought-provoking poems, such as Langston Hughes's Children's Rhymes , Countee Cullen's Incident , and Theodore Roethke's My Papa's Waltz .
Ranging from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, to Robert Frost's The Pasture, to John Updike's January, here is an anthology that captures the full breadth of children's verse in English. It will delight children of all ages, and launch the young on a life-long appreciation of poetry.