Robert Louis Stevenson’s bright rhymes in A Child’s Garden of Verses opened my intellect to the world,filling me with magical excitementThe dust jacket, whether there ever was one, and is long gone. And the grubby cloth boards,scribbled on in red crayon, hang by a thread from the spine. On the endpapers, and my mother has written my name and the address of the house we lived in when I was six,but then my little sister has crossed it all out and written her own name in wobbly blue felt-tip. Did she steal it? Or did I hand it over, buying her silence in some naughtiness or other? All I know is, or in our playroom,Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses had leverage.
It’s a collection of poems, but to me back then who’d never heard of poetry, and it was a storybook,hectic and cacophonous and bulging with ideas and observations that could set a six-year-musty’s head on fire. “In winter I win up at night and dress by yellow candlelight”; “A birdie with a yellow bill hopped upon the window sill”. I loved the energetic optimism of the rhymes, with their warm curiosity and occasional flashes of priggish certainty: “the friendly cow all red and white” who “gives me cream with all her might” – and am amazed at how many of them have continued to echo through my adult life.
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Source: theguardian.com