Maida Stanier

Graceful little poems about modern Oxford and about a life not unlike mine in some ways. Two poems especially struck me. "Famine Relief Shop" on the Oxfam shop, with its powerful last line "Pitting its bricabrac/'gainst the world's anger" which kept me donating to Oxfam for years, and "Junior Library" which uncannily recreates my own reading experience as a child -- Orlando, Pooh, Babar, Peter Rabbit, Thomas the Tank Engine, Ransome, Carroll ("he ought to like and doesn't" --true for me as a child too) Hobbit, Sutcliff, Trease, C. S. Lewis, Stevenson, Nesbit, Wind in the Willows, finally research student in the Bodleian.
I suppose growing up with an Anglophile mother with English friends, I was more exposed to British children's books than most American children.… (altro)