This collection brings together the poems Ted Hughes wrote throughout his life for children. They are arranged by volume, beginning with those younger readers and progressing to the more complex and sophisticated poems of Under the North Star and What is the Truth?, and Season Songs, which he remarked were written 'within hearing' of children. Hughes reveals his instinctive grasp of a child's insatiable curiosity, humour and invention, and his own incomparable understanding of the natural world, in poems that engage and stretch the imagination in a way no other poet has done before or since. Raymond Briggs brings to the collection drawings that capture the wit, gentleness and humanity of these poems and make this a book any reader will return to again and again for inspiration and reassurance.