How Many Points for a Panda?

With the author’s own lively illustrations, these poems are perfectly pitched for younger readers. There are poems about family relationships; about flights of imagination; about everyday enjoyments and mysteries; and about finding your own place in the world. Hilda Offen has a gentle voice whose chosen subjects are closely observed and deeply considered and expressed in verse that is enviably simple and elegant. Perhaps she is best at capturing fleeting moments, like the memory of holding a duckling in a farmyard, the insignificant but intense contemplation of an altered world through window glass, or the feel of a warm midsummer day in the park. She rarely strives for effect and the boy in one poem who enlivens his description of ‘A Field’ with warring knights and a unicorn is subtly and sympathetically chided for missing all the life that is actually going on around him there. On the other hand, in ‘TheTour’, a poem that echoes the celebrated “Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed, she is firmly on the side of a boy being dragged around a stately home who would much rather be out there running about in the sun.