Robln of Sherwood
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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.
Robln of Sherwood
Michael Foreman
It does Morpurgo's splendid version of the Robin Hood legend a disservice to think of it simply as a 're-telling'. Its content and characters may already be familiar to many readers, but few of these will be prepared for the dramatic re-invention of Sherwood, its 'outcasts' and their fight against oppression and privileges. Brilliantly framed between an opening and conclusion in which dream and reality merge, the principal focus of the narrative is on Robin and the urges which create, motivate and, ultimately, destroy him. It is a totally absorbing psychological study, to which an integral contribution is made by Foreman's richly atmospheric watercolours. These, like the text, enforce a strikingly new perspective on some of our best known stories.