Catullus for Children

Caught between the two cities of Hamilton and Wellington, a poet returns to her favourite themes of domestic life, her children and the Russian poet she loves. In the first part of ""Catullus for Children"", Anna Jackson adapts some of Catullus's famous verse to the playground, sharply noting the obsessions and the preoccupations of her children in poems with titles like ""War"" and ""Party"". ""The Treehouse"" is a further selection of poems on family life: affectionate, amused and wistful. In ""The Happiness of Poets"", the Russians talk and sing and play games with words, and finally in ""Stow Stay"", the family moves south, packs up and gets ready for a new life, ""every step an arrival"". The poems are full of tenderness and delights in the child's world, but they also suggest fear and anxiety at its fragility and a knowledge that children soon grow up and take on the burdens of adulthood.