Contemplate soaring swallows and scolding seagulls, a mosquito who wakes up one morning as an elephant, a little apple tree determined to bloom and a mountain that finally moves, after a million years, at least. These and many more delightful images await in the wonderful world of Inger Hagerup’s poems.
Following Little Parsley, this new Hagerup volume was first published in Norway in 1971. At the time, it was a literary scandal for offering free verse to children, who were best suited, as the critics claimed, to the orderly rhymes of established poetic forms. Time and the inherently free and wild forms of youthful imagination have proven the critics completely wrong. Gorgeously illustrated by Paul René Gauguin, with his most antic line, as well as hand lettered, and playfully translated by Beck Crook, this collection of Hagerup poems is pure pleasure.