101 Poems about Childhood

Michael Glover reviews an edited volume entitled 101 Poems about Childhood for the Independent.

101 Poems about Childhood was edited and compiled by American poet, Michael Donaghy, who passed away suddenly last year. While the volume is not aimed at children per se, it seems as if it would be a nice introduction to poetry for the tween and early teen set. "The focus," Glover writes, "is not so much on so-called childish behaviour, but the way in which a child's mind works and develops." The volume contains poems by Marvell, Wordsworth, Whitman, and Bishop, among others.

Glover's concluding paragraph to this review is particularly eloquent. He writes, "Michael, you have done us proud in this book - not least for the fact that, like the best of children, you lacked pomposity and self-importance, another familiar blight of poets."