Collected Poems for Children

Causley is one of the finest modern English poets writing in traditional forms; he is best known for his poems for children; and some of the poems found in this collection - 'Timothy Winters', for instance - will be as familiar to adults as they are to children. There are two good things about collected poems. Your have all the poems you admire to hand, and you can discover or rediscover others. That said, this is obviously not the best way for a child to begin with Causley or any poet, particularly as withing these 416 brilliant pages, from fifty years, there are poems suitable for anyone from 3 to 90 years old, and the rather arbitrary grouping of the poems into sections is more a convention than a help. There are, of course, shorter collections that are more accessible for children: this will be one for teachers and other poetry lovers to mine for the gems within. Lawrence's black and white line miniatures stay on the amusing, absurd side of Causley, but all the other voices of a poet who looks so long and hard and lovingly are there in the poems themselves.