The first words children learn to say are often the verses of nursery rhymes, and with luck and encouragement they will keep their enthusiasm for poetry right through their lives. The best encouragement of all is to get children to write their own poems and, better still, to publish them. That is what Bradshaw Books have done in Eurochild '99 edited by Catherine F.Creedon (Bradshaw Books, £4.99), an anthology of poems by children gathered together mainly by the Cork Women's Poetry Circle.
Two-thirds of the poems are from Ireland, and the others come from Finland, France, Italy, Germany and Greece, and there are drawings by children, too. The poems show just what marvellous imaginations and insights children can have, as in Debbie Booker's lyrical and mysterious "The Magic Box", which begins:
I will put in the box
A holiday of a lifetime
Golden stars from the sky
And the touch of a gentle hand . . .
The range of subjects is enormous. The children write about loneliness, friendship, boredom and bullying; about ghosts, dolphins, brothers and sisters, shoes, football, pets, school lunches and even head-lice. It's a moving and highly entertaining collection.
So is another unusual anthology with the delightful title Sheep Don't Go To School (Bloodaxe, £5.95 in UK). Andrew Fusek Peters has gathered nearly a hundred "mad and magical" poems, riddles and tongue-twisters for children, from his own Czech tradition and from elsewhere in eastern Europe, and the translators - Seamus Heaney among them - have done an excellent job of putting them into lively English. There are aptly zany illustrations by Marketa Prachaticka for poems with titles like "My Mad Granny," "The Cat and the Chef" and "The Bear's Dilemma". There are emotional poems as well as funny and surreal ones, like the title poem, which ends:
Whoever never went there
Was given a special prize
So no one went and the sheep school shut
Which comes as no surprise!
It's the kind of poem that would appeal to Colin McNaughton, a specialist in humorous and weird verse which he illustrates himself. His latest offering, described as "a Book of Poems and Pictures for Globe Trotters", has the title Wish You Were Here (And I Wasn't), published by Walker Books at £10.99 in the UK. Here you can read about fishing for compliments, travelling in Transylvania, how Tarzan fell out of the trees, and a camel called Titanic, as well as meeting Miss Melanie Mish:
Here is a picture of Melanie Mish,
She hails from the planet of Flong,
Weighs nine-hundred kilos and smells of old fish,
If you think that she's ugly - you're wrong!
For very young children, John Foster has a new batch of poems, Bare Bear (Oxford University Press, £3.99 in UK), with amusing illustrations by John Wallace. There are counting rhymes and join-in verses as well as poems which celebrate things that children love and parents detest, like the one which begins:
Rosemary Rudd says,
I like mud!
Gordon Snell is a children's author. His next book, The Secret of the Circus, will be published by Poolbeg in the autumn