The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children

The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Childrenis a treasury of great poems chosen for the sheer pleasure they offer to readers of all ages. Compiler Gillian Avery's aim was to avoid condescending to children and "to assemble a collection of poems that the owner will not outgrow." With that in mind, she has included very few works that were written solely for a young audience. The more than 250 pieces gathered here range from ballads to epics, from inspired nonsense to memorable reflections on love and death. A wide variety of poets grace these pages, from Mother Goose to Shakespeare, from Emily Dickinson to Noel Coward, from Robert Frost to Ogden Nash. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Rosetti's "Goblin Market" will enchant young readers as much as T. S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats" and Lewis Carroll's "The Mock-Turtle's Song" will entertain them. Adorned with engravings by the eighteenth-century artist Thomas Bewick, this collection belongs in every family's library.

Gillian Avery (1926- ) was born in Reigate, Surrey, where she started her writing career as a journalist on the Surrey Mirror. Deciding that the pace of book publishing was more congenial than that of newspapers, she went to Oxford in 1950 to work for the Clarendon Press. In 1952 she married a don, Anthony Cockshut, and when they moved to Manchester she was so homesick for Oxford that she set her first novel, The Warden's Niece (1957), in an Oxford college in Victorian times, feeling an affinity between her own pre-war generation and the Victorian child, characterized by a 'meek acceptance of the power of the adult world'. Returning to Oxford in 1964, she continued to write novels, including A Likely Lad, set in Manchester, which won the Guardian award for children's fiction in 1971 and was successfully dramatized as a children's TV serial.

Gillian Avery is also well known as a reviewer and historian of children's literature. Her two most recent books are Behold the Child: American Children and their Books, 1621-1922 and The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children.