The Owl & the Pussycat - Softcover

Edward Lear, artist, illustrator, and poet, wrote nonsensical stories and popularized the limerick with works such as ""The Owl and the Pussycat"" and ""A Book of Nonsense"". His work has influenced children's poetry from Dr. Seuss to Jack Prelutsky and delighted children and adults for ages.

Michael Hague is renowned as the illustrator of many children's classics, including editions of ""The Wizard Of Oz"", ""Peter Pan"", ""The Hobbit"", and ""The Velveteen Rabbit"", as well as ""The Book Of Dragons"" and ""The Book Of Pirates"". He lives with his wife, Kathleen, a frequent collaborator, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Ages 5^-8. Hague offers an assortment of selections from Edward Lear's immortal compendium of nonsense, still as absurd and extravagant as ever. Among the poems are "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo," "Calico Pie," and "The Duck and the Kangaroo," as well as a generous sampling of limericks. The task of illustrating Lear's poems would be daunting for any artist thanks to Lear's own inimitable sketches, but Hague's quaintly antiquated style fills the bill, and his trademark use of lavishly dark and murky colors, which can easily overwhelm certain subjects, is well matched to the words here. Hague plays off the sensual and grotesque elements of the poetry and uses rich texture and imagination to extend the text's foolishness. This is a worthy collection, as zany today as it was when Victorian critic John Ruskin first included it in his list of the best hundred books ever written. Shelley Townsend-Hudson