Reviews: The Ring of Words

This review was first appeared online - a self proclaimed instant poetry library

   [The Ring of Words is...] For my money the best anthology of children's poetry for at least a decade -and not all of it is 'children's poetry'! Marvellously illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura (of Angry Arthur fame), the book is divided up into 'chapters' with titles like 'Be Like the Bird', 'Chalks of Many Colours' and 'Thoughts Like an Ocean'. The result is a thoughtful but hugely entertaining wander through poetry down the ages. Includes names you know (Larkin, Rossetti, Kipling) and those you will want to get to know better (Stanley Cook, Jackie Kay, Theodore Roethke).

By Anthony Wilson (2000)

This is an excerpt of an article that first appeared in The New Statesman, Dec 4, 1998.

   Children like poetry for its imagined worlds, emotional resonance and the way that its sounds and shapes reveal the character and texture of words. There are the galloping rhymes and nonsense of Lewis Carroll; the booming drama of Blake's "Tyger" or Shelley's "Ozymandias"; the relish and strangeness of words like "charabanc", "shilly-shally" or "meniscus" (all from Norman MacCaig); the dreaminess of Eleanor Farjeon; the heady music of Masefield's "Sea Fever". The Ring of Words (Faber & Faber, £14.99), Roger McGough's excellent new anthology for children, offers all these and more.

   There are poems that use the contemporary device of the fantasy perspective, such as falling off a mountain or waking up inside a cabbage, as well as recent work by Jackie Kay and Matthew Sweeney, two fine poets whose writing for children reminds us how emotionally ambitious the genre should be. There are also poems never usually thought of as being written for children but that fit in beautifully here. The imaginative ease of Wallace Stevens' "Disillusionment often O'Clock" baffles many adults but children should have no trouble with it. The different sections are signalled by running heads so the flow isn't broken; the poem titles are eye-catching and thus memorable; and Satoshi Kitamura's mysterious and illuminating drawings are a delight.

By Lavinia Greenlaw.