Gerard Benson, Judith
Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, the team
behind this book and CD, are the innovative
trio responsible for the continuance
of Poems on the Underground,
which offers something more nourishing
for the commuter than advertisements
for mobile phones, iPods and Dating
Agencies. One hopes.
From this trio we now
have The Carnival of the Animals,
which consists of a book of commissioned
poems inspired by the music, illustrations
by Satoshi Kitamura and a CD of the
music played by the Apollo Chamber Players
directed by David Chernaik. Children
will thus be introduced to sight and
sound, to the poems, the exuberant drawings
that illustrate them and to the vivacious
music that inspired the ensemble.
There are thirteen
poets. Edwin Morgan for instance rubs
shoulders with Charles Causley (the
Poems on the Underground team
were big fans of Causley I seem to remember)
who nestles near Wendy Cope, Adrian
Mitchell and Gavin Ewart. As Ewart died
in 1995 I wonder how long ago he was
commissioned. But all the poets, better
or lesser known, contribute fine work;
none feels either sentimentalised or
"written down" for children.
Tough, wry, humorous or whatever they
take possession of their allotted beast
and Kitamura sets to work, in a style
ranging from the elegant green and grey
wash of Horses to the lurid disco dance
of the Tortoise, from the drained grey
Donkeys to the African-reminiscent styling
for Wendy Cope’s Pianists.
On the CD each poem,
read either by Cicely Herbert or Gerard
Benson, is followed by the music that
inspired it and so on throughout the
disc. This isn’t quite the place for
textual analysis but all the poems are
attractive and respond in imaginative
ways to the challenges. Cope, naturally,
is the funniest, whilst X J Kennedy
catches perfectly the sibilants that
evoke Aquarium. The most important thing,
as I noted, is that these are poems
rich in "scurry scamper" (to
quote Kennedy’s Hopkins-like compound)
and are alive to the kind of imagination-stretching
texts that will give children great
pleasure.
I ought to point out
that only one stanza of Causley’s The
Swan has been printed. But the pocket
housing the CD has been sensibly placed
near the book edges and can be flipped
over like a pancake to gain admittance.
A clever solution to a long-standing
problem.
Jonathan Woolf
Walker Books ISBN 1 84428 021 7 £10.99 Disc
[55.04 of which music is 22.41] 
