A Child's Garden of Verses
1885
These are not poems about children. They are poems from within childhood itself - a shimmering interior world where cherry trees become foreign lands and shadows harbor escaped prisoners. Written by Robert Louis Stevenson at thirty-four, looking back with fierce tenderness at the consciousness he once inhabited, these sixty-four verses possess the rare gift of remembering childhood as it actually felt: the vast importance of a garden, the terror and beauty of night, the unbearable slowness of waiting for one's father. Tasha Tudor's watercolors here are themselves a kind of poetry - soft English meadows and guttering candles that make the past feel like a place you could step into. The book works as a door. Step through, and you are seven again, hiding in the gooseberry bushes, watching the lamplighter walk his slow circuit down the street.
