Rhyme and reason
BARRY COLE
The Wind Has Wings : Poems from Canada compiled by Mary Alice Downie and Barbara Robertson illustrated by Elizabeth Cleaver (our. 35s) Shadows and Spells edited by Barbara Ireson illustrated by Gill Simmonds (Faber 16s) Around the Seasons Eleanor Farjeon illus- trated by Jane Paton (Hamish Hamilton 180 A Flock of Words collected and annotated by David Mackay illustrated by Margery Gill (Bodley Head 35s) Canadian poetry induces little response in most readers' minds and Canadian poets— Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and one or two others apart—are probably unknown out- side their own dominion. But what might be
called the dominion of the child is a very dif- ferent country. A child from Edinburgh, for example, would get much the same as a child firom Skoodawabskook froth this:
'Forbear,' the courteous robber said, `Your outcries and your curses, For you can take your lives away By giving up your purses.'
The Wind Has Wings contains sufficient white knights and lovely ladies, butchering pirates and bosky threnodies to satisfy the ,,ntost literate and romantic child, and the qual- ity of the verse is outstandingly high. The illus- trations, in dazzling colours by Elizabeth Cleaver, are a constant delight to the reader— children not old enough to read, however, find them occasionally puzzling. No bad thing. There is, incidentally, enough that is purely indigenous in the book to justify the 'Canada' of the sub-title: maples, bears, 'the Frozen North and the Great Lakes, the Eskimos and the Red Indians.'
Shadows and Spells, though slighter and by comparison drearily illustrated, is an equally interesting collection. Barbara Ireson has sought well for her eerie subjects, which cover ghosts, witches and the supernatural. The fol- lowing, when it sank in, was received by my children with impressive cries of nervous de- light: _Wha lies here?
I, Johnny Dow.
Hoo! Johnny is that you? Ay, man, but a'm dead now.
The late Eleanor Farjeon's -poems have always seemed a little remote to a 'life-long city addict like myself so it is pleasant to be able to recommend Around the Seasons, an anthology of her poems based on the country- side's seasonal changes. Neatly rhymed, gentle and pretty, they occasionally manage an un- meant surprise: a dragonfly which settled on the hand of a city child would probably not, as it does here, induce immediate delight.
Finally, a huge wodge of a collection with poems for all ages from all time and continents. A Flock of Words, collected by a real en- thusiast, is particularly rich in oriental and contemporary poets, and must be recom- mended despite its apparent exclusion of any- thing Canadian.
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