Under the North Star; Ted Hughes/ Leonard Baskin

It is no secret that the children’s poetry section is the Biafra of most bookshops. Neglected and betrayed, it is a shadow of its former shelf. The starvation of the imagination is heart-breaking, the little aid in the form of yet another ‘burps and bogeys’ book or well-meaning charity/sleb collection may well do more harm than good.

What is needed is single-author volumes by great poets with strong voices who write poems that can be appreciated by children, not ‘children’s poetry’; and better yet, visual artists who can interpret the poems and magnify their beauty and power, focusing them like a burning glass onto the dry savannah of a child’s imagination. Now we have a poet as children’s laureate, perhaps wonderful poetry books like Under The North Star will come back into fashion. Individually, the poems and pictures are superb; together, they are as good as any book gets. Though originally written for a child, there is nothing childish about these poems, which combine with the stunning pictures to evoke the landscape and animals of the Arctic Circle. Even the song-like, simple rhymes and rhythms are child-like only by the way; primarily they are ancient, spell-like. Reading Under the North Star, I longed to be a child again, to read with the whole body, to be absorbed by the book’s voice.

Large and bleak, in colours as clear and precise as the poetry, the animals in the pictures stare at the reader, as uncompromisingly themselves as Ted Hughes’ poetry has defined them. The stark white Arctic page is their land: mystical, totemic and real, the animals in this poem are both magic and modern. Here they are, word for word: the Loon

 Writhes out of the lake
Like an airborne snake 

the Moose is 

a walking house-frame(…) 

With massive bony thoughts sticking out near his ears
– Reaching out palm upwards (…) 

Harsh and beautiful, and each poem given a page of white space to frame it. The layout of the book is key: pictures and words work in perfect harmony with each other. The poems have room to breathe, the pictures focus the reader onto the faces: wise, evil, cunning, stupid, humorous, of the animals in the poems. 

Some poems feel more inspired than others, but Hughes’ powers of vision and description are breathtaking. And often funny, too.

 The Bear’s black bulk
Is solid sulk. 

The poems lurch, swing, move with the ungainliness, the grace, the rightness of all animals in their right landscape. I remember reading, in an old issue of National Geographic, a report by a man who had gone to visit a tribe in Sumatra who were said to be Stone Age relics. The writer’s description of a certain boy pf the tribe lodges in my head. He spoke of moving through the jungle with the boy, and how the child moved ahead of him, running and jumping without hesitation, from tree to ground, a single motion from leap to halt, purely in context, right – not graceful, not balletic, just right. Animals, the writer said, moved like that. But he had never seen a human being move that way before.Animals don’t put a foot wrong, though they waddle, or lope, or shy, their bodies are honest, unlike those of humans, who have relegated their bodies to the status of chambermaid to the mind.
Animals move right. And that is how these poems and pictures move together – right, precise. The poems may lurch between totemic and pop, between now and always, natural and artificial, animal and human, but Hughes always sees the animals’ rightness, their themselves-ness. He doesn’t need a pastoral ideal and he doesn’t throw away his own point of view as a human animal, either. In his eyes, the Muskellunge (a fish) can be  

An interplanetary torpedo

 that

 …took a job with the lake
As jaws
For the hunger of sunk bedrock 

Or, from The Musk-Ox: And the mountains stare towards them fadingly
Like solid-frozen mammoths staring at a Coca-Cola sign 

It’s right. Animals have no time, no way that they ‘should’ be. They are in both our dreamtime and our dinner. What Hughes and Baskin capture is something essential about these animals, even if that essential thing is their timeless ineffability. 

 Under the North Star; Ted Hughes, drawings by Leonard Baskin.Faber and Faber; 1981; ISBN 0571 117 21X