EVEN TO THOSE who enjoy the subversive aspects of children's literature, the late Shel Silverstein can seem like a step too far. Poet, songwriter, composer, cartoonist, screenwriter and author, his “union for children's rights” demands not just for “longer weekends” and “no Brussels sprouts” but “less baths and showers”.

Whether you know his work through songs such as A Boy Named Sue, Twenty-Five Minutes To Go and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, made famous by Johnny Cash and Marianne Faithfull; through the Mafia film Things Change, which he wrote with David Mamet, or through much-anthologised poems, he is an enduring influence. Next month, Jewish Book Week celebrates his quixotic vision with a “Shel Silverstein Session of Silliness” on March 2.

Silverstein is one of those American children's authors whose genius for irrationality is, like that of Thurber, Seuss, Addams and Lemony Snicket, something to which young children respond. Like our own Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, he is constantly relishing the outer limits of absurdity. He imagines people on Mars with “the same charms and graces...the same heads and faces/ But not in the Very same Places” (with heads growing out of bottoms), writes a poem which is a list of excuses not to go to school, and asks whether we ourselves might look upside-down to “the Upside Down man”. His characters are so much on the side of disobedience as to form a virtual credo for children of the 1960s, and today.

A quintessentially 1960s figure who grew up in the Midwest, he said in a rare interview that he “never planned to write or draw for kids” and was unaware of the similarities between his graphic style and that of Thurber and Steinberg until he was 30. His people and animals twist, stretch, contort and distort in the effort of keeping alive. Like Dr Seuss, he teases language; one of his best-known books, Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook, is full of mock heroic spoonerisms about a rabbit.

The choice of a (male) rabbit may raise a few eyebrows if you know that for six years Silverstein was on the staff of Playboy magazine, where many of his drawings first appeared. However, Ursula Nordstrom at HarperCollins persuaded him to do a book for children, and the result produced such classics as Lafacadio the Lion Who Shot Back and The Giving Tree.

The Giving Tree is about a man's relationship with a tree, who loves him and gives him everything he asks for. As a boy, he plays in the tree's branches and eats its luscious fruit; later, he courts under it. Then his demands become increasingly destructive, as he uses its wood for a house

and chops it down to use its trunk for a boat, in which he sails away. Eventually, as an old man, he returns to sit on the stump and rest. Is it a parable about the dangers of unconditional, one-sided love, or a hymn in praise of it? It's hard to tell.

Innocence in Silverstein's poems and stories is almost as dangerous as greed. Sidewalks (pavements) can end, leaving a child peering over the edge as over a diving board, lions can discover guns, and misunderstandings abound. Like Lewis Carroll, he celebrates the zany (making a swing “with no rope or board or nails” by means of growing a moustache “a hundred inches long”), but also describes the consequences. One poem tells about a boy who, when given a wish, cleverly wishes for three more wishes, and then squanders his life wishing instead of living and giving. His would-be flying hippo is given three alternate endings - happy, unhappy and “chicken”; his world is one in which the babysitter believes her job is “to sit upon the baby”.

His poems and parables are far from the robust fairytale roots of Jewish storytellers such as Sendak and Singer. They are urban creations, anxious, sensitive and quirky, informed perhaps by the post-Holocaust disquiet in which Jews realised that being normal can still get you killed.

Runny Babbit, Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic are published by Marion Boyars

The JCC Tribute Troupe perform the work of Shel Silverstein on March 2 at 3:30pm, Royal National Hotel, London WC1. Tickets from 0844 847 2274 or jewishbookweek.com

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