Draws on poems from the classics to the contemporary. The poems in this anthology are an index of the idea of childhood, from nostalgia to expressions of love for children, from the celebration of births to the mourning of childhood death - childhood's psychology and persona, its pleasures and terrors, and the loss of innocence.

Childhood, according to Rilke, was one of poetry's two inexhaustible sources. The poems in this anthology are an index of the idea of childhood, from nostalgia to expressions of love for children, from the celebration of births to the mourning of childhood death - childhood's psychology and persona, its pleasures and terrors, and the loss of innocence. Edited and introduced by Michael Donaghy, this wonderfully evocative book draws on poems from the classics to the contemporary: from Homer and Shakespeare, through Blake, Clare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Coleridge, and right up to the twentieth-century poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds and Paul Muldoon.