How about this suit

Black and stiff but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is Waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof

Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

These lines, from Sylvia Plath's poem, The Applicant, strike the note which we have come to associate with her work if that is, we except the two children's books which she wrote in 1959.

One of these, the playful and perky rhyming poem called The Bed Book, was published in 1976 now, 20 years on, comes this delightful prose work found some time ago among her papers at Indiana University. Put against the lines above from The Applicant, it turns out to be a suit of a very different colour one that its author was sadly unable to wear more often.

The story, set in a little village called Winkleburg, principally concerns seven year old Max Nix and his passionate longing to have a suit of his own, one which will be "for All Year Round", "for doing Everything", rather than for any specific purpose.

One day a huge package arrives at the Nix household. When eventually unwrapped, it does indeed prove to contain a suit and a most idiosyncratic garment it is "woolly whiskery brand new mustard yellow with three brass buttons."

But it is not, alas, for Nix, at least not initially. His father and his six older brothers have to take their turns in trying it on, aided by Mrs Nix as she feverishly snips and clips in her attempts to match it to their various sizes.

Reluctantly, however, they all eventually have to decide that, given the nature of their various professions and leisure time pursuits, the suit is not quite right for them. For Max, patiently awaiting developments, the final snips and clips can now be made and the much desired garment is his euphoria sets in.

At the heart of The It Doesn't Matter Suit lies a tremendous sense of narrative and verbal playfulness. Plath structures her story in such a way that the reader becomes involved not merely with Max and family but also with the topography and the populace of the wider Winkleburg community, a vaguely Tyrolean world of snow capped mountains, dark pine forests, leather knickerbockers and apricot tarts.

Here lives, apparently in total harmony, a colourful assortment of humanity, all (if Max is to be believed) engaged in responding to his new found finery even the cats and dogs are "purring and grrring" with admiration.

The essentially carefree happiness of the Winkleburg setting is mirrored in the sunniness of Plath's language, particularly no table for its exuberant similes. Caps of snow "like three big scoops of vanilla ice cream" decorate, the mountains the moon rises "round and bright as an orange balloon" the river, far below in the valley, is "small and thin as a silver ribbon".

Behind the freshness of these and numerous other images is a view of the natural world and its wonders that represents the utopian perfection for which childhood innocence yearns. Max will, of course, ultimately grow out of his yellow suit but till then, Plath glowingly reminds us, he will joyfully wear it.

The naive style of Rotraut Susanne Berner's illustrations a succession of brightly detailed glimpses of the story's setting, mood and characters mischievously re-enacts the text.

Indeed, the book's overall design, from its vividly yellow end papers onwards, is a triumph of sympathetically child centred intent. By all means, in Philip Larkin's phrase, take one of these home for the kiddies but take one for yourself as well.