Children's Poetry Collections

The books I read were Favorite Poems Old and New, Selected for Boys and Girls by Helen Ferris (1957); Poems to Read to the Very Young (1982), selected by Josette Frank, and A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Many Stevenson poems were included in the other two collections.

For the most part, these poems bored me out of my mind. I was reminded of when I read every Sherlock Holmes story one after the other. Individually, they might have been caviar, but consumed all at once they were more like Spam. They tended to be pretty insipid, reflecting the sweet-rural-innocence view of childhood. I longed for Shel Silverstein, with his gulpable caviar, or Dr. Seuss with his tasty confections.

The Ferris book was huge--567 pages of poems and more than 40 pages of indexes and credits. The book's average of two poems per page added up to more than 1000 poems. The poems were nice enough and some of them excellent, but most were bland. Roughly half were poems from "real" poets like Stevenson, Dickinson, Hughes, and so on. If I had children to read to, this book would be a useful resource, I think, and would certainly introduce some grand formal language.

I was frightened by the fact that the world of this book is completely gone. Today's young don't do the things the kids in the poems are doing, roaming freely through the out-of-doors, staring around in wide-eyed wonder, watching plants grow and cheerful birds pull worms from the ground. Kids don't occupy their own charmed world, and I'm sure they never did, but this vision of bucolic, mild, gentle children has deeply persisted.

I've written before of the odd prevalence of agricultural and gardening imagery in children's literature, even though the agrarian era is completely past. Whenever children see where vegetables are grown or cattle are raised, for example, it's always in a small garden or on a small farm and the cattle are cheerful even though heading to slaughter. Milk comes directly from the bucket to the table. The Ferris book is actually more balanced than the other two because it has more of an academic slant. It includes selections of Shakespeare and beautiful quotes from the bible. The 23rd psalm is in the book. But this tome is culturally archaic and I say this sadly, not sneeringly. It tells me we really need more Shel Silversteins and Dr. Seusses to speak to our modern children of modern times. The Pokey Little iphone. Three little pigs crying "Wii, wii, wii" all the way home. Let's write for the kids we've got, not the kids we wish they were.

The Frank book is insipid. Most of the poems in this book were also in the Ferris book. I thought that by 1982 we would have been a bit more culturally advanced, but the illustrations in this book show rural small town life (a few city scenes thrown in) with every child but one being white. I don't know how that one black kid got in there on page 15. There is also one illustration of "children of the world," with appropriate stereotypes--looked like the art was from 1962 instead of 1982.

Again, the poems in the Frank book would not hurt a kid, and added to a bedtime story would be beautiful. But it might benefit your children to have more up-to-date selections available.

A Child's Garden of Verses just makes me barf. Coy. Precious. Soft-soaped. Sentimentalized. I know Stevenson is famous for this book, but I can't stomach it. As with the Frank book, it's probably not harmful, but I don't think our children 200 years later will relate to it.

Earlier in my reading list, I read a baby book of little poems and they were quite nice, small poems written directly for small children. Here is my review of three books by Kay Chorao, including The Baby's Bedtime Book.


Kay Chorao's The Baby's Bedtime Book is a collection of poems for babies and toddlers, with big, thick, cardboard pages. The illustrations are beautiful and the poems are sweet. They are focused on woodlands and farm life—so prominent in the experience of today’s kids. If you share this book’s idealized vision of babies, you’ll love the poems, too. And, really, they are repetitive and gentle—good for calming babies in preparation for sleep.

 

I also picked up two other books by Chorao. Pig and Crow is a funny picture book about a lonely pig. I liked the fact that the pig got tricked over and over by the crow, but came out happy in the end. Kids learn about growing plants and hatching birds—what you see is not what you get—a little seed turns into a big pumpkin. A small egg turns into a fun goose for company (not dinner). All good. I think little kids would enjoy this book.

 

Little Farm by the Sea takes you through the life of an idealized family farm—one where they grow and raise just about everything at once. The book moves through the growing season from early spring plowing and planting through late fall harvest. The romance with our rural past continues. Are young people really able to relate to this? In the time of Dora the Explorer and ipods? I thought this book, though beautiful, was pretty boring. It was way more didactic than Pig and Crow in presenting the cycle of life.