Alan Murphy

The esteemed Gabriel Rosenstock has left our company very recently, and all too soon. Acclaimed for his large contribution to both adult and children’s Irish language literature, this posthumous rhyming picturebook is a fantastic addition to his legacy. Comprising of a whistle-stop tour of Ireland, the place names thus encountered, in the tradition if not quite the form of the limerick, handily providing the rhymes for the whole extravaganza.

Marking the great Michael Rosen’s 80th birthday, this collection, with visual accompaniment from five different illustrators, is, as the subtitle suggests, a celebration of a long life in poetry. It comprises of many well-loved and some perhaps lesser-known poems, and is broken up into five sections, illustrated in rotation by the different artists including Yasmeen Ismail, Polly Dunbar, Quentin Blake, Ken Wilson-Max and Bob Graham.

‘Each to his own’ could be the motto of this book. Some go a bundle on delicious café food, whilst others salivate at the thought of bogey broth. Glumfoot, the young protagonist, dreams of something tastier than the latter, and when the aroma of pastry from a new café reaches his cave, his only task is to prevent an ogre from eating the proprietor of said establishment before he can enjoy the food there himself. Easier said than done.

This polymorphous picturebook focuses on a cat and its very special tail. The furry protagonist, who expresses himself through said appendage, finds that suppressing his emotions is a bad strategy. Ultimately though, he lights the way for others to be as flamboyant as him.

Ghost Boys is a graphic novel with a message and a mission. An adaptation of the book of the same name by Parker Rhodes, it is narrated by the ghost of a twelve-year-old Black boy, Jerome, who’s body we see lying dead in the opening pages, shot in the back by a cop. Jerome is one of many ‘Ghost Boys,’ – an innocent victim (he was playing with a toy gun) of white racism, ignorance and negligence. The book teases out Jerome’s story through alternating ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ segments, and connects it to those of America’s racist past.

There’s nothing drib drab about this book. Containing all sorts of unlikely creatures and concepts – the Uncertain Curtain, the Slug of Knowledge, the Laughing Leaves, Mubbles, Wibbles, and, yes, Drib Drabs – it is set on the Isle of Smile and unfolds in brightly coloured comic book form.

Following on from last year’s I Am The Wind, Sarah Webb is back with another verse anthology, this time with The O’Brien Press, and one ‘designed to be read to children from birth upward’. This jaunty, lavish book, lovingly illustrated by Paul Delaney, is a cornucopia of silliness and sentiment. Composed to a significant degree of items that are the common inheritance of our culture, it also contains nursery rhymes, nonsense poems and song lyrics from specific authors, from Longfellow to Lisa O’Neill.

Titled after a 19th century poem by Taras Shevchenko and provided with an impassioned foreword by historian Max Hastings, this book constitutes a first-hand telling of numerous ordinary Ukrainians’ experience of the current war. Complemented by the author’s drawings of both wartime street scenes and the people who confided in him, the stories are frank and shocking; the warm ink and watercolour illustrations obsessively detailed though unfinished, as if to convey a disjointed reality.

This collection is a bestiary, with some clever, witty and thought-provoking poetry. We begin with ‘Poetry Rules’, a poem that, mercifully, makes it clear there are no rules in poetry. And on it goes, tallying up at sixty-plus poems covering a plethora of topics. There’s fun to be had with poetic forms; haiku, clerihews, acrostic poems and cinquains all get a look in and are treated with suitable flippancy. Morgan-Jones’s nimble illustrations are often delightful, putting wind in the sails of the verse.

This ‘Treasury of Complete Nonsense’ is a homage to – or send-up of – Blanche Fisher Wright’s bestseller of 1916, The Real Mother Goose. It comprises six well-known nursery rhymes reimagined in a variety of surprising ways.