mirror mirror a book of reversible verse

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was later turned into the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical Cats. Eliot (188-1965) also wrote a book of nonsense verses about cats for his godchildren. Eliot, ‘ Macavity, the Mystery Cat’.Īs well as writing such modernist poems as The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’, T. In a series of clear and easily visualised images, Robert Louis Stevenson summons the magical charm of the river with its ‘looking-glass’ aspect: it’s like a mirror not only because we look down and see ourselves and the world around us reflected in the surface of the water, but because, to the imaginative child, the water hints at an inverted world, a magical realm beyond our own.Ĩ. When he wasn’t writing classic novels for younger readers like Treasure Island (1883), or Gothic horror novellas like Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was writing verses for children, which were published in A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1885. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘ Looking-Glass River’. What a great way for children to learn about the oral (and aural) power of poetry: a great kids’ poem to be read aloud!ħ.

In ‘Fish’, Hoberman uses a series of lively and evocative verbs to suggest the movement of fish through the water: wiggling, swiggling, swerving, curving, and so on, with each verb gently meandering into the next through some shared sound-association. She’s also been extraordinarily prolific, writing over 50 books, all but one of which were written in verse. Hoberman served as the Poetry Foundation’s children’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2011, and her work remains popular with kids. He then hung a glow-in-the-dark lamp in the nose so it could guide him to his lost love … She leaves, and he is heartbroken.īut he doesn’t give up: he constructs his famous luminous nose from bark picked from the fictional Twangum tree, painted it red, and tied it to the back of his head with cords. This poem is about a mysterious figure – the fictional Dong – who falls in love with a girl from a foreign land (she is one of the Jumblies, who feature in another poem by Lear). But it’s also a glorious work of the imagination, a colourful poem full of life and, even, of hope. If Lewis Carroll offered marvellous heroic nonsense verse for kids in ‘Jabberwocky’, his fellow Victorian nonsense-maker Edward Lear (1812-88) brought pathos to the genre.

Mirror mirror a book of reversible verse