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Summary
Summary
This collection brings together the more than 250 children's poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his career. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those published for younger readers and progressing to more complex and sophisticated poems that he felt were written "within hearing" of children. Throughout, Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child's insatiable wonderment and sense of humor as well as his own instinctive and illuminating perspective on people and other creatures of the natural world.
With drawings that capture the wit, range, and richness of these poems, acclaimed illustrator Raymond Briggs helps make this a book any reader can return to again and again for amusement, inspiration, and reassurance. Collected Poems for Children is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Author Notes
Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in England and attended Cambridge University, where he became interested in anthropology and folklore. These interests would have a profound effect on his poetry. In 1956, Hughes married famed poet Sylvia Plath. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1957 until 1959, and he stopped writing altogether for several years after Plath's suicide in 1963.
Hughes's poetry is highly marked by harsh and savage language and depictions, emphasizing the animal quality of life. He soon developed a creature called Crow who appeared in several volumes of poetry including A Crow Hymn and Crow Wakes. A creature of mythic proportions, Crow symbolizes the victim, the outcast, and a witness to life and destruction. Hughes's other works also created controversy because of their style, manner, and matter, but he has won numerous honors, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, and the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1974. His greatest honor came in 1984, when he was named Poet Laureate of England.
Ted Hughes died in 1998.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Collected Poems for Children by Ted Hughes (1930-1988), illus. by Raymond Briggs, gathers more than 250 poems that the former Poet Laureate of England wrote for children throughout his lifetime. Briggs's lively half-tone spot illustrations unite, for instance, humorous poems such as "Hermit Crab" ("The sea-bed's great--/ But it's a plate./ Every fish/ Watches this dish") and "Jellyfish" ("When my chandelier/ Waltzes pulsing near/ Let the swimmer fear") with the darker-themed "Wreck" about some sailors' sad end. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) Lucky are the children who receive this collection, for they will experience the world through the exquisitely tuned words of Ted Hughes. The book begins with a seal birthing awake into the sea: ""There bobbed up a head / With eyes as wild / And wide and dark / As a famine child."" And ends with a lamb dying into the chaotic abyss: ""Stripped and stunned, keeps her battered direction -- / She knows who it is, still alive out there, / That castaway voice / Where heaven breaks up in the darkness."" In between there is wonder: a starfish staring up ""at stars that pour / Through depths of space / Without a shore""; the ""drip-tree stillness"" of a winter's morning; a brooktrout ""superb as a matador."" Every page reveals a glimpse of life at once familiar and utterly strange. This is not a definitive collection of Hughes's children's poetry: missing are his intensely personal narrative poem FFangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth and the short verse-dramas published in the United States as The Tiger's Bones; the poems from What Is the Truth? have been shorn of their narrative structure. Briggs's soft black-and-white charcoal sketches are, mainly, doodles in the margins; the best ones amplify something implicit. The meat cleaver and knife alongside ""A March Calf"" are graphic reminders that the benign farmer carrying a pail toward the newborn calf knows the end as well as the beginning of that life. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
For reading aloud at home and in the classroom, this collection of 250 poems by the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes begins with those he published for younger children in collections such as Meet My Folks (1961) and The Cat and the Cuckoo (1987) before moving on to more sophisticated works, which he said he wrote within hearing of children. From the eyelash of a baby hare to the gruesome action of the Loch Ness monster, the images swing from tenderness to farce, and in some verses the two come together: in My Brother Bert, The very thought makes me iller and iller: / Bert's brought home a gigantic gorilla. Children will love the sounds of the rhythmic lines, and Briggs' scattering of small black-and-white drawings perfectly captures the tiny details in the words. Some poems will be read over and over again. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF babies get an edge in math by listening to Mozart, might poetry - Mother Goose, Shakespeare's sonnets, Emily Dickinson -tune young ears to the music of language? Here are four collections - two anthologies, two by individual poets - to take children from their earliest delight in sounds to mature enjoyment of such demanding poetry as Ted Hughes's. Like the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose, the verse in Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters's "Here's a Little Poem" is blessed with catchy rhythms. The 61 selections reflect the toddler's expanding world: sections include "Me, Myself and I," "Who Lives in My House?" and "I Go Outside." Good humor reigns, as in Margaret Mahy's strategy with a "remarkably light" sister ("It's a troublesome thing,/but we tie her with string, / and we use her instead of a kite") and Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's "Mud," with its exuberant illustration of gleeful splashing. The pacing is nicely varied: "Mud" follows Langston Hughes's mellow "April Rain Song" ("Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops"). Bedtime poems round out a collection with just one misstep: Milne's "Halfway Down" breaks off halfway, at "the stair / where / I always / stop," robbed of its raison d'être - the intriguing notion that "It isn't really anywhere! / It's somewhere else / instead." Still, with a wonderful range of choices and Polly Dunbar's inviting illustrations, this could become a favorite lap book. Children will meet some of the best-known poetry in English in Jackie Morris's "The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems." Some are so well known as to seem superfluous ("The Road Not Taken," or Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), yet it's worth remembering that children themselves are new. The bright watercolors and intriguing hints of story that Morris splashes across the pages make this an attractive venue for first encounters with the soon-to-be-familiar. Though Morris revels in the romantic ("She Walks in Beauty"), her art serves other moods as well - the "jocund company" of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," Siegfried Sassoon's bitter memories of war. Even without the lush format, the more than 70 poems have enough range and allure to entice the young and the adults who read to them. Luminaries like Yeats and Poe keep amiable company with Ogden Nash ("The Tale of Custard the Dragon") and Alfred Noyes ("The Highwayman"). While anthologies open young minds to poetry's unbounded possibilities, books like the new collections by Valerie Worth (1933-94) and Ted Hughes (1930-98) impart a deeper sense of a single poet. Worth wrote several volumes of "small" verses. Her poems typically segue from the ordinary (raw carrots, say, or weeds; an old clock; a dead crab) to a small, precise epiphany - about what's described, about the reader, about the world. Natalie Babbitt, Worth's frequent collaborator, excelled in delicate pencil drawings that were perfectly paired with the poet's gentle insights. Surprisingly, Steve Jenkins's bold cut-paper collages suit these funny, thought-provoking (and previously unpublished) "Animal Poems" just as well. Don't tell the children (let them enjoy the poems on their own terms), but Worth also teaches what poems can do. Sounds can reverberate ("Snail": "Only compare/our ... rugs and chairs, / to the bare / stone spiral / of his one / unlighted / stairwell") and mimic movement (minnows' "slivers / sift together / in a scintillating / mesh"); the poet adroitly compares (camels "munching and belching / like smug old maids / remembering") or challenges perceptions ("The bear's fur/is gentle but ... we/look, and his / hot eye / stings out / from the dark hive / of his head / like a fierce / furious / bee"). She can build from innocent awe at a gorilla's latent power to an unexpected payoff: "Strong / enough to / fear no / enemy; / feeding / serenely / on celery." Meanwhile, in brilliantly composed collages, Jenkins (whose "What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?" was a Caldecott Honor Book in 2004) catches the essence of each creature - a shaggy groundhog poised on an ample white background, a whale afloat in deepest blue - with expertly snipped paper, textured or marbled, feathery or sleek, deftly adding such details as eyes of luminous intelligence. Worth's voice is quizzical, yet wise and affectionate. Ted Hughes's "Collected Poems for Children," many of them also about animals, are as perceptive and as well informed on nature's minutiae. He too telegraphs profound significance with exquisite skill. But Hughes inhabits a far darker world, fraught with sharp teeth, claws, knives and strange visions: a pig's nightmare of the sun as a fried egg; a needle to stitch poets' eyelids "so they can sing better"; a "Moon-Lily" fading away in "nights of quiet sobbing, and no sleep for you." The word "children" in the title of this omnibus (it incorporates eight earlier books) is unfortunate. Older kids will enjoy the first 60 pages, especially the oddball characters in "Meet My Folks!" But even here it's often the deceptively cheery rhymes and rhythms, more than the subject matter, that suggest a young audience. In the first poem a seal's eyes are "as wild / and wide and dark / as a famine child" that has "lost its mother." And while some poems are laced with humor and virtuosic wordplay, Hughes tends to upend the most innocent context with abruptly savage imagery. On the other hand, teenagers will easily relate to such darkly allusive, fantastical works as his "Moon Poems" ("In every moonmirror lurks a danger. / Look in it - and there glances out some stranger"). Absorbed in the newly discovered depths of their own souls, they're ripe to appreciate disillusionment, as well as Hughes's phenomenal craft. Adults, however, may be the best audience for the cruel beauty of the poems that make up "Season Songs," with their expert depiction of rural life and resonant imagery. Raymond Briggs's drawings are splendid: they develop the fantastical, underline fierce horror or add a touch of pathos. His sensitivity, rough humor and grasp of humanity's dark side match the poet's perfectly - another reason this book is a keeper, one to rediscover in all life's seasons. Joanna Rudge Long, a former editor at Kirkus Reviews, writes and lectures about children's books.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-6-Hughes penned more than 250 poems expressly for children, which were previously published in The Mermaid's Purse, The Cat and the Cuckoo, Season Songs, and others. Now they are gathered together in one book beginning with the volumes most suited for elementary-age children and progressing in complexity. Some of Hughes's witty and irreverent verses require sophisticated and patient readers because he includes creative grammar when he wants them to rhyme ("Far undergrounded, Moon-miners dumbfounded") and uses mixed cadences within a single poem that confound reading aloud without practice. Words more commonly used in England, "your telly's there," and "pans spitting by sixes" may slow some American children; however, the sheer variety of poetic styles will please many others. Briggs's stellar ink, mostly realistic illustrations suffuse the sections for younger children, where animals and family are the subjects, and become sparer for longer narrative poems. Although the audience may be somewhat limited, this is an important addition to any large poetry collection.-Kirsten Cutler, Sonoma County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Amazing things happen on the page when giants write and illustrate for little people. This volume collects and arranges the poetry of Ted Hughes by subject and degree of complexity. Considerately edited, poems sit right next to Briggs's charcoal drawings, which wryly illustrate them. Subject matter of the verse--animals, "my folks," planets and the seasons--offers much to ponder for inquisitive minds and for teachers who wish to integrate poetry with their content area instruction. Hughes's love of monsters can connect to the work of Roald Dahl and allows for much imaginative--and literary--exploration. For educators, the word that best describes this collection is lagniappe. Young readers will find much to fall in love with, to read and re-read and to read aloud. A necessary antidote for today's youngster who might be missing out on an affirmation of youth and innocence as well as an experience of complex, playful lyrics composed by a master of word music. (Poetry. 8+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Collected Poems for Children Skunk Skunk's footfall plods padded But like the thunder-crash He makes the night woods nervous And wears the lightning-flash - From nose to tail a zigzag spark As warning to us all That thunderbolts are very like The strokes he can let fall. That cloudburst soak, that dazzling bang Of stink he can let drop Over you like a cloak of tar Will bring you to a stop. O Skunk! O King of Stinkards! Only the Moon Knows You are her prettiest, ugliest flower, Her blackest, whitest rose! Excerpted from Collected Poems for Children by Ted Hughes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
