Round About Six

This is a reissue of a collection of a dozen poems and stories first published over 15 years ago: it has not lost any of its magic and my young audience were as entranced as those of the nineties used to be. We all laughed out loud at ‘Page Twenty-three’, Mike Rosen’s bedtime story, and gasped in horror at the thought of killing a bear to create a cure for Baldilocks’s hairless pate in Dick King-Smith’s neo-fairytale. Our spines tingled at Naomi Lewis’ wonderfully atmospheric poem, ‘Jamie’ (set in a forest), we thoroughly enjoyed filling in the gaps to create (unsuitable) sensible lunches for Crispin Crunch in Christopher Fry’s poem ‘Sensible Food’ and Ian Serraillier’s ‘Birthday Treat’ still prompted plenty of ‘eergs’, ‘yucks’ and cries of ‘can you read it again?’

The illustrators include Quentin Blake (‘Birthday Treat’), Russell Ayto (‘Sensible Food’), Pauline Baynes, who has framed Ted Hughes’ pair of ‘Sea Poems’ and Jan Pienkowski, who provides a wonderfully elemental, full-page illustration for Causley’s ‘Days’. All in all, this anthology still merits a place on the bookshelf of those the compiler describes as ‘Round About Six’.