Otter-Barry, ISBN:978191307480-7 £7.99
This is an exuberant anthology with subjects ranging from daily life incidents, concepts of time, the joys of cycling and the greening of cities with riddles, puzzles and contrasting pairs of poems (lake/city or hush a’clock/storm a’clock) along the way. Some poems have a clear rhythm: ‘Tower block, tower block, bridge, bridge, bus’, repetition (‘tiptoe, tiptoe, tip-tiptoe’) or refrains (‘Forever my love, forever.’), while others delight in the possibilities offered by word-order changes: ‘ Let’s pick sweet cobberries,/where spiders weave their blackwebs’. There are plenty of poetic styles which children might emulate: kennings to find other ways of describing animals such as ‘soft-talker, earth-pecker, dawn-fetcher’ for a chicken, or ‘My name is …..’(fill the blank with a colour) with lines describing grey like, ‘I am the owl’s wing and winter sky’ as inspiration. There is even a poem inviting different ‘middles’!
The black and white illustrations are very beguiling too. Look out for ‘The eyes-shut barber shop’. The book is not all unalloyed joy, however. The title poem of the collection is full of the poignancy of losing one’s home as a child: ‘we live at Leaky Roof….we used to live at Back Home…..Now my mother and I talk about Belonging Street’. This is an anthology to savour on the lips, to discuss and most of all to inspire young poets to explore and enjoy language themselves.
Sue Barrett