A Century of Children's Poems

Foster has collected a hundred poems, mainly from familiar names of the last 100 years. Some of the poems are already thoroughly anthologised - de la Mare's 'The Listeners', Seamus Heaney's 'Trout', Masefield's 'Sea Fever' and many more - but some of the most interesting are perhaps less well-known - like Banjo Paterson's 'Mulga Bill's Bicycle' and David McCord's 'The Star in the Pail'. The offer of one poem per poet does give the reader a wide choice of names to sample, though it brings also the difficulty of tuning in to a different voice all the time. It might be good for the reader - child or adult - to read a few poems at a time, and follow up favourites with a look at others by the same writer. The anthology idea itself is puzzling, perhaps, in the interest it assumes in the number 100. Could it be that the intense pressure to find 'new ideas' is driving publishers away from ideas that connote something in terms of content - collections of poems about something - and towards the safety of collections that don't take such risks.