The Best Primary Poetry Anthology Ever selected by Lesley Pyott

It seems I have had this poetry wonder forever...well since my third year teaching in 1986. I have used it countless times to inspire children to poetry and it covers many topics, some being: Ghosts, The Circus, Trains, Animals, Cats, Dogs, People, The Beach, just to mention a few of the chapters in this book. Not only does it have a wide variety and forms of poetry, but it also includes some helpful suggestions to get students writing. This book now joins the poetry section in our Little Library of Rescued Books. It contains my favourite poem ever by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

A Children's Zoo compiled by Julia Watson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world he stands.


The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

This is one of my favourite poems, The Eagle by Alfred Lord Tennyson and it is one of the poems in this book. We had to learn it for an Eisteddfod when I was in grade 5 at Ulverstone High School. This poetry book, as the title suggests, is all about animals. It includes poems by Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Ian Serraillier and D.H. Lawrence, as well as many others. The first section is all about the insect world, the following section is about four-footed animals, then there's a section on two footed creatures with poems entitled The Ostrich, The Bat, The Red Cockatoo, and the final part is an assortment ending with a poem called Wilderness. 
The poems are accompanied with ink drawings done by Karen Strachey.