Now You See Me. Now You …

Children’s poetry is currently a mess of good intentions. A sense of humour, a liking for language and wordplay, and a friendly, matey concern for children seem to be the only qualifications needed to win over the anthologists and get into print. Standards are confused, anything goes, and adverse critics are made to feel like spoil-sports. Risking that, I have to say that the poems of Chrissie Gittins, which have won quoted approval from respected commentators including Michael Thorn, Helen Dunmore and Morag Styles, leave me deeply unimpressed. There are plenty of good ideas and starting-points, but the execution repeatedly shows the faults now all too familiar in many other writers: clumsy metre, haphazard and lazy rhyme (now you hear it, now you don’t), arbitrary details which don’t add up to a whole, forced humour, limp endings, a heavy dependence on mere comic oddity. A few of the poems work (notably ‘The Tale of Dotty Cuddletum’ and ‘Gillian Costigan’) but most badly need to be worked at.