Aardvark Day – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Nature poems reveal everyday wonder.
Children’s book title: Aardvark Day.
Children’s poet: Victoria Gatehouse.
Children’s illustrator: Kate Lucy Foster.
Genre: Children’s poetry.
Published by: The Emma Press.
ISBN: 9781915628572.
Recommended for children aged: 9+.
First published: Paperback May 2026.
This children’s book is ideal for: children who enjoy poetry about animals, plants, rockpools, pebbles and the mystery of the natural world.
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Our review:
Here’s another gem from The Emma Press, based in Birmingham, whose editor, Emma Dai’an Wright, rounds it off with three pages of brilliant advice to youngsters wanting to start writing poetry themselves. I was reminded of Ted Hughes’ classic Poetry in the Making.
From page one, with Poem for a Pebble, Victoria Gatehouse reveals her intention with the whole collection: to share with us her vision of the natural world, not only in all its startling variety, surprises and connections, but also the mystery contained in what is apparently commonplace and unremarkable. I’m not going to quote the obvious lines from William Blake but really, isn’t that the ultimate aim of all poetry and art?
I thought of the billions of years
it took to make you this way –the spit of volcanoes, the cold roes of glaciers,
the wild beating heart of the sea.
It often happens that when I’m reviewing a book on the site, by sheer coincidence, I am reading another book which reflects and enlarges the ideas in it. When I read the four lines quoted above, my mind immediately spun back to Learning to Dance by Michael Mayne. He has written a series of books, and the basic message of them all is: Look at the world! Marvel at the sheer coincidence of it, the magic and variety of existence!
This ‘ordinary’ pebble, ‘the secret I hold in the snug darkness of my pocket,’ reappears in the final poem of this selection, Otter Pockets, where sea otters are pictured floating on their backs, each clutching ‘a special pebble.’ All children still living through that special time between the ages of six and ten, and all adults who are still in touch with that child who once lived in them, will recognise that specialness: a stone, a secret place at the bottom of the garden or in a field nearby, a stick with an odd shape which can become … anything.
The whole of the natural world seems to be compressed into these sixty-two pages: trees, rockpools, aardvarks, armadillos, belugas and their heartbreaking songs, dragonflies, sloths, butterflies, elephants, peat and the whole earth itself – all accompanied by delicate, detailed pen-and-ink illustrations.
I’ll just add that I’ve read the whole thing with my oldest grandson. He’s eight next month and he loved it!
Many thanks to The Emma Press for the review copy.
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