Editorial – July 1998

Digital version – browse, print or download

BfK Newsletter

Receive the latest news & reviews direct to your inbox!

BfK No. 111 - July 1998

Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.

Article Author:

Rosemary Stones

This issue of BfK focuses on poetry – from a survey of the most recent publications for children and young people and a profile of a poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, whose poems constitute a powerful commentary on the world we live in, to A Child’s Garden of Verses in our ‘Classics in Short’ slot and a review from Margaret Meek of Morag Styles’s long awaited history of 300 years of children’s poetry, From the Garden to the Street.

But while interest in poetry appears to be booming (and Bloomsbury Children’s Books are launching a new poetry list) it is still the case that many adults find it hard to discuss poetry with children and encourage them to enjoy and write poetry themselves. Poetry enthusiasts, Gwynneth Bailey, John Lynch and Kevin Berry take three different aspects of using poetry with children and come up with some practical ways forward. On page 14 of this issue, your attention is also drawn to the first of a new BfK mini-series on ‘Useful Organisations’, in this case The Poetry Society and all it has to offer.

At BfK one of our most requested items is still ‘Four Steps to a Poetic Primary Classroom’, a series of check-lists on how to become a Poetry Enthusiast Teacher. It can be found in A Guide to Poetry 0-13*.