Hughes, Shirley. Out and About: A First Book of Poems. Candlewick, 2015. (U.S. edition)
Shirley Hughes is a well known author and illustrator on the other side of the pond in Britain. She has won the Kate Greenaway Medal for British children’s book illustrations twice –for her books Dogger and Ella’s Big Chance—and many more awards and honors for her work in writing and illustrating children’s books. The author blurb in my library copy of Out and About tells me that she illustrated more than two hundred children’s books in her lifetime. Ms. Hughes died in 2022.
Out and About is a collection of poems for each of the seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter. Katie and her baby brother, Ollie, explore nature in the poems and pictures that fill this little 42 page picture book brimful to overflowing. The book begins with a poem called “Out and About” and a picture of Katie walking down the garden path while her baby brother stands in the doorway and watches her. The laundry is flapping in the breeze on the clothesline, birds are flying about, and it looks like an altogether lovely day to be outdoors. In some of the other poems Katie tells us why and how she likes mud and water and sand and wind. The entire book is an ode to nature and the changing seasons, and it would be a great addition to a nature study time or a poetry tea or any read aloud time with younger children.
The poems in this book reminded me of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Ms. Hughes’ poems are more impressionistic, like lists of images and brief reactions to them. However, they are, like Stevenson’s poems, about simple childhood experiences: going to the beach, playing in the snow and in the water, Christmas Day, climbing a hill and rolling down, walking in the rain, a fall harvest. I added this book to Picture Book Preschool under the heading of Wind and Weather because so many of the poems are about the seasonal changes in weather and about experiencing the outdoors.
One of my favorite hobbyhorses is the idea that children need to hear and enjoy lots of poetry: nursery rhymes, silly songs, RLS, A.A. Milne, Christina Rossetti, and more. Shirley Hughes’ Out and About: A First Book of Poems would be perfect for the poetry section of your library and of your morning time or read aloud time.