The Oxford Treasury of Classic Poems - Softcover

Michael Harrison lives in Oxford, and Christopher Stuart-Clark lives in Windsor.

Gr. 6 and up, younger for reading aloud. The 93 poems in this glorious collection have thrilled readers and performers for years, and the lines still sing to kids today. Many older adults once learned these poems by heart; their rich cadences are still with us--not the stiff pious stuff, but the rollicking and the romantic, the poems with rhythm and rhyme for speaking out loud. Like so many of the excellent Oxford anthologies, this gathers not just the old but the most memorable and most immediate for children today. Open it anywhere: there's Auden's "Night Mail," Noyes' "The Highwayman," Rossetti's "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," Blake's "Tiger," Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," Hopkins' "Pied Beauty," Carroll's "You Are Old, Father William." Yes, nearly all the poets are dead British men, but one collection can't do it all. Use this with Ruth Gordon's wonderful global anthologies, with Arnold Adoff's new revised edition of I Am the Darker Brother (Jan_. 1997), and with some of the great contemporary anthologies that include women and men from everywhere. The slightly oversize volume is spacious in design, and the illustrations by a number of artists are elusive, subtle, never overwhelming; in most cases, they suit the tone of the poem, whether it's nonsense or high drama; the pictures for Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" are unforgettable. Teachers will want to read aloud from this book, and kids will take it home to get more. Hazel Rochman