Skellig
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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.
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Skellig
A move to a new house coincides for Michael with the anguish of bearing his new baby sister's medical problems. Will she live? As the baby fights for her life in a hospital incubator, Michael learns, with the help of his new friend Mina, to look wider and harder at the world. If we are, as William Blake (Mina's favourite poet) tells us, surrounded by angels and spirits, then which is Skellig, the mysterious being Michael discovers in the ramshackle garage of his new home?
An intensely written and fast moving fable, Skellig deals with the threat of loss out of which comes change as Michael begins to bear not knowing whether the baby will survive. Skellig (part-angel, part-invalid, part bird of prey) is both a loving figure providing protection, a shambolic figure requiring care and a cannibalistic creature feeding on the mice and fledglings provided by the owls who befriend him. This integration of a loving character with both vulnerable and unlovely aspects is unusual and touching. Just as the blackbirds and owls in the overgrown gardens that are the setting for much of the story nurture their young even while danger stalks, so Michael takes in his baby sister's very heartbeat and wills her, via Skellig, into life.
An author of fiction for adults, this is Almond's first children's book. It is well and confidently paced despite a touch of bathos at the end. A considerable achievement.
