This is the second of Walter de la Mare’s poems to be turned into a picture book by Carolina Rabei and her illustrations provide a rich setting. It’s Hallowe’en and ‘Up on their brooms the Witches stream/Crooked and black in the crescent’s gleam’. Sure enough, a line of witches race across the night sky on their broomsticks, while down below a party of jolly trick or treaters set out on their own night’s adventure. The two groups mirror one another, and the lines of the poem work equally for both. The night sky is portrayed in wonderful blues and purples, the centre spread in which the witches surge pell-mell down the Milky Way is particularly beautiful. De la Mare guides his witches through the constellations in his poem, and Rabei illustrates them all, the end papers providing readers with a very special chart of the night sky. ~ Andrea Reece
Up on their brooms the Witches stream, Crooked and black in the crescent's gleam It's Halloween and a family is preparing to go trick-or-treating. Little do they know that up above them a coven of witches flies unseen through the starry sky...Carolina's stunning illustrations beautifully illuminate Walter de la Mare's thrilling, magical poem, published as a picture book for the first time.
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was born in Charlton, Kent. In 1890, aged sixteen, he began work in the statistics department of the London office of Anglo-American Oil. In 1907 he published his first collection of poems under the pseudonym Walter Ramal, but he soon established a wide popular reputation in his own name as a leading poet of the Georgian period with volumes like The Listeners (1912), Motley (1918) and The Veil (1921). He also wrote poetry and short stories for younger readers; Peacock Pie (1913), a collection of poems for children, is now considered a twentieth-century classic.
