Christmas favourite Peter Pan is retold in verse by Caryl Hart and with glorious full-colour illustrations by Sarah Warburton in a new version that does proper justice to Barrie’s original: spritely verse speeds us through the story, while still including all the plot twists and turns, and the strange otherness of Pan is still there in illustrations and text if you choose to look for it. This year too, Katherine Rundell revisits Kipling’s jungle to tell new stories of Mowgli and his wild family. Into the Jungle explains the events that made Bagheera, Baloo, Shere Khan and Kaa who they are, in exciting adventures that put the emphasis on loyalty and community. Rundell’s new stories seem to grow out of the originals and to enhance them. This handsome book also features beautiful full-colour illustrations by Kristjana S Williams. John Yeoman’s fantastical story The Boy Who Sprouted Antlers is also newly available. The story of a boy who, yes, grows antlers – in response to a school friend’s challenge, in turn prompted by a teacher – it is just as fascinating and as joyful as when it was first published, though as its illustrator Quentin Blake points out in the introduction, with its shorts-wearing protagonists, something of a period piece.


Poetry collections


Published in association with the National Trust, I Am the Seed That Grew the Tree is a truly beautiful book, an ambitious project perfectly realised. It features a nature poem for every day of the year, selected by Fiona Waters and illustrated over glorious full-colour pages by Frann Preston-Gannon. The poems have been chosen with real care, a huge range of poets represented, and each one will capture young readers’ imaginations. This deserves to become a classic, and should do what its creators intend and inspire a lifelong love of poetry in readers. There is of course no reason why poetry should be confined to the page and congratulations to poetry champions Macmillan who have released a CD audiobook of Allie Esiri’s superb anthology A Poem for Every Day of the Year. Read by Helena Bonham Carter and Simon Russell Beale, don’t go on a Christmas car journey without it, spellbinding listening for all the family. For older readers, Ana Sampson’s anthology She is Fierce is highly recommended. An outstanding collection of 150 poems by women poets – something that is rarer than you’d hope – it features brilliant contemporary poets including Liz Berry, Jackie Kay and Imtiaz Dharker alongside suffragette Laura Gray, renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna and pioneering journalist Winifred Holtby. Sampson includes biographical notes on each woman at the back of the book. Finally, T S Eliot always intended to follow up Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats with a companion book Consequential Dogs, but never managed it. Christopher Reid however has risen elegantly to the challenge and written up a ‘rowdy assembly of dogs as counterparts to Eliot’s mogs’. Young readers might miss some of the literary allusions, but they’ll love meeting the dogs – Dobson, the dog detective; Lola, who runs away to join the circus; Flo, the philosophical Foxhound; and Benbow,


the


ghost of an old seadog who haunts the Ship Inn. The wit of the verses is matched in


Elliot


illustrations, to


Elam’s and


this is another book


bedtime reading an absolute shared pleasure.


make


Books for Keeps No.233 November 2018 7


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