the Children's Classic Poetry Collection

This book, compiled by Nicola Baxter and illustrated by Cathie Shuttleworth, is designed as a means of introducing children to the magic of poetry in such a way that they will be captivated and spurred into a lifelong interest in and love for the craft.

   I can only say that it seemed to have worked on me. This book was given to my family when I was six years old by my teacher at the time (Miss Smith, you're almost certainly not reading this, but regardless, thank you) as a 'well-done-for-not-dying' present when I spent some time in hospital. I was already a fairly bookish child, and the broad selection* of verse accompanied by simple and engaging illustrations truly captured my imagination; though that said, my interest in poetry then plunged once I discovered the joys of (in this order) sci-fi, fantasy, literary novels, and non-fiction, and only two or three years ago did I to whatever extent revisit the purity of non-prosaic linguistic forms - but even almost two decades after this book was gifted to me, when I had forgotten the bulk of its contents and even most of the illustrations had so far faded from my memory that they didn't even strike me with déjá vu this reading, it brought me a deep and strange comfort to realise that several of the poems contained within I was able to recite (Ozymandias and the Jabberwocky in entirety, and portions of others), and if that's not a testament to the profound impact on one's cultural subjecthood that books like this can have if bestowed upon people at appropriate times in their life, then I don't know what is.

   With my revisitation concluded, I am going to return this item to the bookshelf in my parents' house (where I found it yesterday and asked as I flipped it open in surprise 'no way, was this the one given to us by Miss Smith when I was in hospital?'), in the hope that another small child may someday have a similar experience.

* It contains verse by Williams Blake/Shakespeare/Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walters Scott/Whitman, Roberts Browning/Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, Emilys Brontë/Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Edgar Allen Poe, Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, and a few others, including more than a handful of anonymous rhymes.