First Page Excerpts [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- INDEX: Signal 92 May 2000 The Signal Poetry Award 2000 to Christopher Reid's All Sorts: Peter Hollindale & Sophie Hannah 71 The Unlearned Lessons of the Stories Children Tell: Hugh Crago 94 Hans Christian Andersen Award 2000 to Anthony Browne Jane Doonan 119 Books about Children's Books 1999: Sheila Ray 126 Contributors 143 *********** The Signal Poetry Award 2000 to Christopher Reid’s ‘All Sorts’ PETER HOLLINDALE & SOPHIE HANNAH The Signal Poetry Award for work published during 1999 has gone to All Sorts by Christopher Reid, published by himself as Ondt & Gracehoper. The most important aspect of this annual award is the selectors’ writing about the winning book and other poetry published for children and young people during the given year. The booklist appears on pages 92-3. Peter Hollindale writes: The children’s poetry published in Britain during 1999 just fitted into one very large plastic storage box. By December the regular arrival of large parcels had almost ceased, and other, more seasonal, packages had begun to take their place. Having read books one by one as they arrived (often not a very time-consuming task) I had begun to look at the box with some perplexity. How could the single winner of a poetry award emerge from such an eclectic and heterogeneous assembly? There were single-poet collections, ranging from ‘silly verse for kids’ to work barely distinguishable (if at all) from books ‘for’ adults, and in some cases borrowing all or part of their contents from earlier volumes aimed at grown-ups. There were thematic anthologies, some playing with everyday aspects of child life and others with a missionary agenda. There were open anthologies, some for the very young, others for the adolescent; some with split personalities, others where it wasn’t obvious why the book had been published for children at all. Where four or five dozen were gathered together, they announced a corporate uncertainty on the fairly fundamental question of what a children’s poem actually is. Physically, too, they were a mixed bunch, ranging from dowdy pamphlets on cheap paper to large and sumptuous productions that were models of the book-designer’s craft. How many merit points should go not to the poet or anthologist but the illustrator, designer, editor, printer, or the obscure investment managers of children’s verse? The habits of a lifetime argued, ‘Make a list’. Like a Dalek circling round the study murmuring if not ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ at any rate ‘Eliminate! Eliminate!’, I compiled a shortlist of unignorable books, which all represented, even if patchily, some evident distinction. Among the single-poet collections, it included Gillian Clarke’s The Animal Wall and other poems, Carol Ann Duffy’s Meeting Midnight and John Mole’s The Dummy’s Dilemma and Other Poems. I added two single- *************** The Unlearned Lessons of the Stories Children Tell HUGH CRAGO Susan Engel is an American college teacher who describes scholarly research in a way that is accessible to the interested lay reader. Her 1995 book, The Stories Children Tell, subtitled ‘Making Sense of the Narratives of Childhood’, summarizes a good deal of (mostly recent) research into young children’s narrative capacities and understandings. ‘The stories we tell and listen to shape who we are,’ Engel states confidently. ‘They give body to our own experience and take us beyond the confines of everyday life—into the past, the future, and the might be. Without living in a world of stories children can never attain full literacy’ (vii). These claims will be familiar enough to most readers of Signal since they have been made repeatedly by those concerned with literature for children during the course of the twentieth century. Yet Engel’s book includes almost no reference to children’s books. The ‘stories’ she refers to are almost wholly narratives that children compose, mostly at the request (and possibly with the collaboration) of adults and, except in the case of one deliberate experiment, apparently uninfluenced by literary models. This is a salutary reminder that, even in highly literate cultures, published, adult-composed stories may not form a significant part of children’s experience of narrative. Yet to write about ‘living in a world of stories’ with hardly a reference to the stories that ought to, and often do, form part of our children’s cultural heritage strikes me as more than a little odd. Not even Richard Scarry’s Busytown or classics like Where the Wild Things Are get into this book. Are You My Mother? is mentioned (page 40) but not referenced in the notes or the index. As far as Engel is concerned, children’s literature does not even exist in the form of video movies, television cartoons or computer games, surely potent influences on the lives of multitudes of children and almost certainly—though she fails to acknowledge it—influences on some of the ‘spontaneous’ narratives she discusses. The Stories Children Tell rests on the contention that children’s sense of selfhood develops in part through storymaking, yet its author fails to use more than occasionally and superficially the body of theory and evidence that has most to say about the development of selfhood: psychoanalytic developmental psychology (Stern and Greenspan, for ************** Hans Christian Andersen Award 2000 JANE DOONAN The Hans Christian Andersen Awards are presented by the International Board on Books for Young People every two years, to an author and an illustrator whose complete works have made an important and lasting contribution to children’s literature. The announcement that Anthony Browne is the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2000 for illustration is cause enough for celebration; furthermore, he is the first candidate from the United Kingdom to win the award since its first year, 1956, when Eleanor Farjeon received it for her writing. This short piece for Signal is both a tribute to the artist and a reminder of the range of Anthony Browne’s work. In just over two decades he has illustrated thirty-two works that engage and sustain the interest and pleasure of readers of all ages and objectives, whether infants, adolescents, adult-sharers, teachers or academic theoreticians. Browne has many strengths as a picture-book maker: originality of vision; the pursuit of worthwhile themes and honesty in dealing with them; exceptional technical skill; the ability to generate playfulness—play in the fullest sense—for his readers; and a pioneering approach that has taken the picture-book medium into new territory in its formal construction as well as its subject matter. In his first picture book Anthony Browne sent not only the central character but all his readers into a surreal region that is now associated with his pictorial style. When we open a work illustrated by Browne we know generally where we shall find ourselves, though we cannot be sure what else we will find. Of the surrealists Suzi Gablik wrote that they ‘radically mistrusted the banal and the conventional, preferring to explore the frontier between the internal and the external world, between the conscious and the unconscious’ (Magritte, New York Graphic Society, 70). This could also be said of Browne. When he fully and structurally integrates surrealistic imagery in the visual narrative, it is most often used to exemplify varying and recognizable states of mind, as in Look What I’ve Got!, Kirsty Knows Best, The Visitors Who Came to Stay and Changes. The blessing of a fertile imagination is celebrated in the first two works while in the last two both natural and man-made objects are transformed by anxious apprehension. In other picture books, like A Walk in the Park, and for many (not all) of the motifs in Piggybook and Willy the Dreamer, the excess of surreal absurdities and ************** Books about Children’s Books 1999 SHEILA RAY Despite the wonders of modern technology, or perhaps because of them, it seems to be increasingly difficult to round up all the publications relating to children’s books that appear in one calendar year. This survey, intended to cover books published or distributed in the UK in 1999, includes some published earlier and one (of which a review copy arrived with amazing promptitude) published in 2000. It also includes books that are not distributed in the UK but likely to be of interest to British readers. I am assured that it is now simple, through the said wonders, to buy books published anywhere in the world. Another problem with this survey has been all the interconnections between the books, which range from one about Beatrix Potter for quite young children to academic works likely to appeal to a fairly limited audience. There are, I think, more than usual devoted to individual authors and illustrators. I have also been struck by the role of societies, the contribution of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the Roehampton Institute—now part of the University of Surrey—and the number of publications appearing in connection with the growing frequency of conferences. In the end, my extended deadline drew alarmingly near and I concluded that this survey had to be a very personal reflection. I can begin confidently with three standard reference works. The new paperback edition of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard is not revised or corrected, just a straight reprint of the hardback edition published in 1983 and costing one pence less than it did then. I consult this only slightly less often than Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, now in its fifth edition as The St. James Guide to Children’s Writers, a new title for a new century with new editors, Sara and Tom Pendergast. But beware, there is a companion volume, The St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, and to achieve the range of information provided by the convenient third edition of Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, you need both. When I first began to study the history of children’s literature in 1958, the most useful and accessible account was F.J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England, first published in the early 1930s, of which Brian Alderson has produced a third, revised edition. One reviewer is critical of the failure to do justice to popular children’s fiction, which has been traditionally ignored by leading historians of the subject, but I *********** CONTRIBUTORS Recently retired as Reader in English and Educational Studies at York University and now a freelance writer and lecturer, Peter Hollindale has written about Robert Westall for 'Telling Tales (Mammoth), a series on modern children's writers; Thimble Press published his Signs of Childness in Children's Books in 1997. Sophie Hannah's latest poetry collection, Leaving and Leaving You, was published by Carcanet in 1999, and Arrow have just published her second novel, Cordial and Corrosive: An Unfairy Tale; she is a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and teaches part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University Writing School. In 1999 Jane Doonan gave lectures and workshops arising out of her Looking at Pictures in Picture Books (Thimble Press) in Australia and Venezuela. Hugh Crago, who has taught both human development and psychotherapy, has been working on the nature of children's interaction with stories for nearly thirty years; his book A Circle Unbroken: The Hidden Emotional Patterns That Shape Our Lives was published in 1999 by Allen & Unwin (Australia). Sheila Ray has been associated with Children's Literature Abstracts since its launch by her husband, Colin, under the auspices of IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) in 1973; when the editorial and production duties where handed over to Gillian Adams in the USA in 1991, she continued to be responsible for much of the British input.