Adder, Bluebell, Lobster, Chrissie Gittins

In Adder, Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry) Chrissie Gittins treats us with forty poems celebrating forty animals, birds and plants by their names. All of the words in the book — lavender and melon and rhubarb and pelican — have one striking thing in common. They have all been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Published in 2016, Gittins created this collection to recapture the words which had been discreetly elbowed out of children’s dictionaries in favour of blog, cut and paste and negotiate.

Adder, Bluebell, Lobster is illustrated by Norfolk based artist Paul Bommer. Chrissie Gittins was born in Lancashire and now lives in South London, working as an artist and teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She was the winner of the Belmont Poetry Prize in 2002 and finalist in the first Manchester Children’s Literature Prize in 2014.

Thank you very, very much to Chrissie for gifting this copy to The Nature Library. Our collection for young nature lovers is still small, but slowly growing with thanks to kind donations like this one.