Songs of innocence and of experience

What it’s like

Pale hand-tinted pages where verse and image grow together: wisps of vine curling around lines, small figures tucked into the margins, washes of green and rose and ochre that look slightly smudged, as if the colour has seeped through the paper. The poems are short, plain-spoken and rhythmic, often in simple ballad-like lines that sound like hymns or nursery songs, so the reading pace is slow and unhurried, with pages you return to. The mood moves between pastoral calm, lambs and meadows and sleeping children under a watchful sky, and a colder, city-smoke unease where chimneys, chains and blighted streets press in. Violence is absent, but cruelty and grief are present in plain, quiet terms: child labour, poverty, a dead child mentioned almost in passing. It suits a slow afternoon with a cup of tea, a reread at dusk, or a student's close reading of a single page. It is for readers who like poetry that is simple on the surface and quietly uneasy underneath, and for anyone drawn to illuminated books as objects as much as texts.