Written by Ted Hughes and illustrated by Raymond Briggs (The Snowman) this beautiful collection has been specially arranged to start with poems for younger readers and progress to the more complex and sophisticated for older children.
Ted Hughes, a former Poet Laureate has an instinctive grasp of how children think and his poems will engage and stretch their imagination. Perfect for a gift and equally perfect on your own shelf so you can dip in whenever you like.
This collection brings together the poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his life for children. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those younger readers and progressing to the more complex and sophisticated poems of Under the North Star and What is the Truth?, and Season Songs, which he remarked were written 'within hearing' of children.
Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child's insatiable curiosity, humour and invention, and his own incomparable understanding of the natural world, in poems that engage and stretch the imagination in a way no other poet has done before or since.
Raymond Briggs brings to the collection drawings that capture the wit, gentleness and humanity of these poems and make this a book any reader will return to again and again for inspiration and reassurance.
Ted Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in West Yorkshire. His father made portable wooden buildings. The family moved to Mexborough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire, when Hughes was seven. His parents took over a newsagent and tobacconist shop, and eventually he went to the local grammar school.
In 1948 Hughes won an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Before going there, he served two years National Service in the Royal Air Force. Between leaving Cambridge and becoming a teacher, he worked at various jobs, finally as a script-reader for Rank at their Pinewood Studios.
In 1956 Hughes married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963, and they had two children. He remarried in 1970. He was awarded the OBE in 1977, created Poet Laureate in December 1984 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998. He died in October 1998.
