My First Oxford Book of Poems

Maybe you've read plenty of other poetry books which contain The Owl and the Pussycat, Robert Louis Stevenson's Windy Nights and Kenneth Grahame's a-dabbling Ducks Ditty, and would skim over another new anthology which collects them.

But if you're six or seven, and you've never been delighted by these classics of children's literature before, perhaps you would dive in to the book and stay there.

The classics take their place in this collection, but they are interspersed with poems which might be less familiar to both the adult and child reader – from Ted Hughes to Langston Hughes to Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. Subtle, serious, long-lasting pleasures from a anthology to form the cornerstone of any child's poetry library.