The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse, Charles Causley

When you open The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse the ocean spills from its pages. Compiled by Charles Causley, illustrated by Antony Maitland and published by Kestrel Books, it includes children’s poetry by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Norman MacCaig, Christina Rossetti and Robert Burns. Flicking through it was a struggle to pick just one, and then there appeared the book’s Index of First Lines, as poetic as the contents preceding it (the entirety of F in particular reads as a poem in itself). 

Charles Causley (1917-2003) was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness, and for its associations with folklore, in particularly in relation to Cornwall. His first collection of poems was published in 1951 and were noted for their longer, narrative style. It was in the 1970s when he began writing and publishing poetry for children. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1958 and awarded a CBE in 1986.