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shanviolinlove's review against another edition
2.0
"For Children."
Without these last two words, this would have been a decent collection (albeit one that relies heavily on names that are almost always canonized and arguably crowding out lesser known but equally merited poets). I checked out this collection to read to my two very young children, the little one especially for language acquisition. Upon realizing that most of the poems do not rhyme, I went ahead and filtered for poems that would foster an early love for poetry.
The poems, unfortunately, are either too esoteric for young children to grasp or way too somber. I literally rolled my eyes at the number of poems graphically recounting war, violence, and death (and this was before I hit upon the section entitled "War"). Any poems speaking to a child's interests were few. The collection more consistently had poems ABOUT childhood, most of which were melancholy--remembering isolation, a child who died, how fleeting youth is and depressing adulthood is, etc. (Time and place for those kinds of poems.)
I'm returning this to the library and recommending the Random House Book of Poetry, curated by Jack Prelutsky, for any fellow parent who was similarly disappointed in this work.
Without these last two words, this would have been a decent collection (albeit one that relies heavily on names that are almost always canonized and arguably crowding out lesser known but equally merited poets). I checked out this collection to read to my two very young children, the little one especially for language acquisition. Upon realizing that most of the poems do not rhyme, I went ahead and filtered for poems that would foster an early love for poetry.
The poems, unfortunately, are either too esoteric for young children to grasp or way too somber. I literally rolled my eyes at the number of poems graphically recounting war, violence, and death (and this was before I hit upon the section entitled "War"). Any poems speaking to a child's interests were few. The collection more consistently had poems ABOUT childhood, most of which were melancholy--remembering isolation, a child who died, how fleeting youth is and depressing adulthood is, etc. (Time and place for those kinds of poems.)
I'm returning this to the library and recommending the Random House Book of Poetry, curated by Jack Prelutsky, for any fellow parent who was similarly disappointed in this work.
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