Illustrated Poems for Children illustrated by Krystyna Orska
When I was a child I was given, or perhaps my oldest brother was given but that’s a different story, a book of poems for Christmas. My friend Christine who lived across the courtyard from us had gotten the same book and she and I used our matching books to write in secret code. In order to use this code you had to find the word you wanted to say in the text of the chosen book. I guess that meant I had to read the poems.
I don’t remember exactly when or exactly why the book became important to me for its content, but I do remember a few years later assigning neighborhood kids the task of memorizing poems for “school.” I still have a lot of them memorized myself.
At some point the book was lost. At first I knew where it had been lost – at my Grandmother’s – and I expected to get it back. But the more trips I made out west, the more I realized I was never going to see it again.
Enter the internet. I could find my book on the internet, couldn’t I? I could list dozens of the poems contained therein. I knew the cover was blue. I could kind of describe the style of the illustrations which were unique. In short, I’d know if it I saw it. But online searching proved no more fruitful than offline searching had been.
One day last spring I was visiting an Aunt when the urge to look for my lost book struck again. I prowled the book cases in her house, disappointed, when suddenly I noticed a stack of books just inside an open closet door in the playroom. Sure enough, there it was. There was never any doubt but if there had been, seeing my own childish writing would have eliminated it.
Illustrated Poems for Children, illustrated by Krystyna Orska is not just another book of poetry for kids. It’s a superb book of poetry for kids. These are real poems, written by poets whose names we all know. They’re not doggeral or nursery rhymes. In all my searching, I’ve never found a book to compare. If you want your children to grow up knowing and appreciating poetry, you couldn’t give them a better start than this book