CLiPPA shortlist reviews

The winner of the 2018 CLiPPA (Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) Award will be announced on 22nd June. Schools are currently shadowing the award and here, you can read reviews of all the shortlisted books.

The shortlist includes established writers - Sarah Crossan's Moonrise and Joseph Coelho's Overheard in a Tower Block - as well as newcomers including the Rising Stars collection which celebrates under-represented voices publishing their poems for the first time. The free Shadowing Scheme to involve schools in the Poetry Award 2018 aims to encourage and support schools in taking poetry into the classroom. Videos of poets performing from the shortlisted books and talking about their work and free, high quality teaching resources are available via the link, below. Here is the full shortlist with reviews by consultant Alison Kelly: - JOHN AGARD: THE RAINMAKER DANCED, illus by Satoshi Kitamura, published by Hodder Review: The Rainmaker Danced is another wonderful collaboration between the irrepressible John Agard and illustrator Satoshi Kitamura. As ever, Agard's themes are wide-ranging and thought provoking. The Rainmaker in the title is none other than a shape-shifting duck as we learn in the witty 'The Rainmaker danced' (p.12). The dancing rainmaker is depicted in full colour on the cover (in vibrant blue and yellow: this is a book that begs to be opened) and then sprawls in ungainly fashion across the double-page spread of this poem. There's another ungainly animal in the shape of the Moon who decided 'one night / to make a pig of herself'. Hilariously, she gives the stars the slip and makes her way 'down sky's staircase' where she has to learn to 'drool and slobber' until 'wallowing was as easy as waxing and waning'. Her secret habit yields a litter of moonlings! As we would expect, Agard delights with dealing out unexpected images and ideas. 'Who'd want to steal dew?' starts 'The Dew Stealers' (p.15). Who indeed? Well, /'if you'd discovered / that dewdrops were heaven's pearls / or that dew meant liquid revenue /', you might be tempted! It's the juxtaposition of unexpected imagery (precious spittle of the stars) with humour (praying we're not caught on CCTV) that gives this poem its edge. Is there really space for another poem about colours (so beloved of teachers needing poems for a 'senses' theme)? Well, yes, if it's Agard's take: 'On the Run from Colours' (p18). These colours are out to get him: 'Green misled me into the woods. / Blue tried to drown me in the sea./' Kitamura's shadowy grey silhouette runs across the page, leaving the reader pondering the final problem posed by grey: 'Fog, what are you? Friend or enemy?' 'The Naming of Giants' (p.23) oozes word play and humour. A huge image of Gozzlemorebum the Gozzler stands on one page with the exuberant poem next to it. 'A giant's name ...' we are told, 'should bludgeon the tongue / with a thundering sound - / a mouthful of syllables / to be savoured and gobbled./' Children will love and want to invent more of the Dahl-esque names (Blunderbore, Blocerknob...) and the contrast with simpleton names like Jack and Jill. Agard also gives serious contemporary themes his poetic treatment. In 'Three Old Mothers' (p.54) we meet Old Mother Frost who is 'alive and well'; Old Mother Thunder who is 'in good spirits', but finally Old Mother Ozone who 'just sits and stares / into her ultra-violet mirror. / She's losing her hair layer by layer - / Cosmic doing? Or human error?' This lovely anthology will make a great contribution to a class book corner. 96 pages / Ages 8+ / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, consultant. - RISING STARS: Ruth Awolola, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Abigail Cook, Jay Hulme, Amina Jama, published by Otter-Barry Books, illust by Riya Chowdhury, Elanor Chuah and Joe Manners. Review: Produced in conjunction with SLAMbassadors and Pop-Up, the impressive Otter-Barry publishing company is showcasing young 'rising stars'; in its latest volume of poetry. With stars in the ascendency, it seemed fitting that I turned firstly to Ruth Awolola's 'A Love Letter to the Stars' (p.17). This is a simple and lyrical poem with sweet undertones of its predecessor 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star': Dreams and wishes and hope and light, / Placed perfectly in the sky. / I'll never understand the power of the night, / How it fills me with love or why? Later in the volume, Abigail Cook's affectionate poem 'Brother' (p.47) also offers a powerful star-studded image: One night / we lay on the driveway / and counted every star / in the sky / plucked them and placed them in our pockets / there to light the way for the darkness ahead'... Victoria Adukwei Bulley's clever 'How to Build a Kitchen' (p.34) conjures up a poem that the reader can hear, see and smell using a sprightly question and answer structure: Toast jumping? / a flight into space / and butter melting? / the tide going low /... A simile of chilli falling like red hot rain is accompanied by Riya Chowdhury's illustration of an umbrella being pelted with chillis: simple yet effective! In the current climate of religious discord, Jay Hulme's 'Reflect it back' (p.66) strikes an inclusive and contemplative note. Underlined by Joe Manners' silhouettes of different religious buildings, each verse takes an identical structure with just the building changing: 'temples', 'churches','mosque' and 'synagogues'. The verses then continue thus: Temples welcome you in, / Absorb your silence, / And reflect it back. / The final verse repeats the structure but with 'life' as the heralding word. This is a poem for our times and sorely needed. Children will be drawn to the unusual juxtapositions in Amina Jama's 'City' (p.74). Elanor Chuah's comic-style illustrations do justice to a camel handing me change / as a cashier in Sainsbury's and the synchronised swimmers in / a flooded bathroom. / As well as the freshness of new voices, what characterises all these poets' work is the skill with which they work with complex ideas using apparently simple devices and forms. Listen out for them all in the future! 96 pages / Ages 8+ / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, education consultant - JOSEPH COELHO: OVERHEARD IN A TOWER BLOCK, illus by Kate Milner, published by Otter-Barry Books Review: This powerful collection of poems was published before the catastrophic Grenfell Tower fire and my first reaction to the title and front cover of this book was dismay at the untimely depiction of a black tower block with its illuminated windows. Kate Milner is a talented illustrator but the image (not of Grenfell Tower and created long before the tragedy) invoked painful emotions and more recent images. So I turned first of all to 'Binley House' (p.10), subject of the book's title. Seen through the Grenfell lens, this is a profoundly moving poem and is a tribute to the communities who inhabit tower blocks. After the intense sadness of the opening verse, the progress of the poem to hope and optimism is remarkable: TV aerials like dead branches, / satellite dishes like dead eyes, / rusted, but still they stared. / It was a zombie of a block. ... We fed the block our lives: / the good times, the bad times, / evenings spent with friends who lived / above, below and side by side. Coehlo captures the sounds ('cold whistle of the wind... the block's hiss', 'slam of distant doors'; sights ('bags of clothes from missed fathers'); smells ('smelling the bins') of life in a tower block but also the humanity, the reality: 'Gazing at stars from five storeys up, / smelling the bins from five storeys below. / Overheard arguments. / Overheard laughter. This is a poem about resilience and community and deserves many readings. Mirroring this empathy with the urban environment is 'City Kids' (p.76), an homage to children's alert awareness of their environment: 'Our city children / are its eyes and ears, / its tongue and nostrils, / closer to the ground, / breathing the city, / playing on the front line'. Kate Milner's illustration of children seeming to fly through an urban setting captures the mood of the poem perfectly. Her illustrations are subtle and apt: they reflect and complement Coehlo's words without overwhelming them; they leave imaginative space for the reader's own images. The collection is compelling. We read of family sadness in 'Disappearing Act' (p.54) about an absent father's missing things which the child voice in the poem has listed 'before they were gone for good': 'His shirts no longer trapezed on the line. / His flowers no longer popped up on the window sills. / His photo no longer lit up the wall.' 'A story of a fear' (p.8) is a rich and suggestive poem. Just eight lines long, it conjures up powerful images and ideas: 'A story of a fear / cloaked in a monster's scaly hide. A fable of feelings / bottled up inside. A parable of a princess / and the spell that she could weave A saga of a kingdom, / of a king who had to leave.' As well as standing in its own right, this could be an impetus for the children's own writing as they might devise an illustrated story for each of the scenarios offered. Coehlo uses artful and sparkling word play. Read 'The Duelling Duo' (p.34) which is ostensibly a vivid description of knights duelling but makes such clever use of double meanings and homophones: 'One would hit - one would miss / in the mind-dark night / with its coal-fist mist. / One blade rang on a helmet, / hand tight on a hilt-rung sword, / both proving their mettle / in this mourning morning.' I would never use a poem primarily for spelling purposes but, once read and enjoyed with a class, there is so much here to engage children's interest in words, sounds and word play. Every poem in this anthology gives the reader pause for thought: whether it's an idea to contemplate; an image that lingers or word play that delights, Coelho's touch is totally assured. His voice concludes this review, taken from the wonderful poem 'Books have helped me' (p.55): 'When I thumb through a book Their pages whisper to me That I'll be all right.' 112 pages / Ages 9+ / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, teaching consultant. - SARAH CROSSAN: MOONRISE, published by Bloomsbury This powerful and affecting verse novel takes and transforms the brutal reality of the impact of an execution sentence on a family. The narrative is seen through the eyes of teenager, Jo Moon, whose older brother Ed is awaiting execution on Death Row in Texas. It was Ed who looked out for Jo as a child, compensating for a rarely present, drug-addicted mother. But Jo has not seen Ed for the 10 years since he was convicted (wrongly) of murdering a policeman; now a date has been settled upon for the execution and this prompts Jo to move out to Wakeling, Texas where the state penitentary (known as the 'farm') is. In an interview, Crossan makes the point that "a verse novel make readers feel successful because they can read it so quickly" and it is a relatively quick - but not painless - read. She goes on to explain that a verse novel works like a series of photographs (whereas a more traditional prose novel is like a film where the author has to show in detail what the characters are doing). Like a photographic image gradually developing in a dark room, a narrative emerges through a series of poems moving backwards and forwards in time. One minute we are back with Jo and Ed as children playing Star Wars games on the sidewalk, the next we are inhabiting the dreadful apartment Jo rents when he arrives, almost penniless, in Texas. Despite the chronological leaps, Crossan seamlessly holds the narrative together across time, locations and characters. There are characters who move in and out of the story: as well as the mother, there are sister Angela and Aunt Karen who plays a forceful role in holding the family together after Ed's imprisonment. In Wakeling, there is kindly Sue, a waitress at Bob's Diner where Jo eats. And there is the complex Nell, with whom Jo develops a relationship but who harbours her own secret. The poetry is spare and, whilst not devoid of poetic devices, these never overwhelm the voice or poignancy of the message. For such a terrible theme, the voice is understated and avoids sentimentality. Indeed the narrative is often shot through with unexpected moments of humour and tenderness. The book offers a clear - but not over-stated - message about the profound issues around the penal system and capital punishment This is not an easy read and teachers who share this with upper secondary pupils will need to tread with care - but share it they should. 400 pages / Ages 14+ / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, consultant. - SUE HARDY-DAWSON: WHERE ZEBRAS GO, published by Otter-Barry Books Review: 'The Weaver of Words' (p.8) is the opening poem in Where Zebras Go. With its delicately orchestrated words, it's an apt overture to this impressive debut solo anthology. In common with the rest of the poems, it is accompanied by Hardy-Dawson's own line drawing. Here, the elegant weaver ('Coarse-fingered / nails, polished / to the points of needles.) is seen with hair streaming and intertwined with words as 'she joins consonants to vowels / whispers them to the wind / and out into the waking world.' It is this attention to the visual nature of poetry that makes the collection so distinctive and gives it special child appeal. Shape poems abound (Old Foxy, p.16, Talking toads, p. 30, Shaggy Dog story, p. 49, Making Tigers, p. 68, Miss Moon, p.87) and, typically, illustrations that enhance but do not overwhelm the poems. A silhouetted owl swoops across the page in 'Who' (p.23) but is not mentioned in the words which draw richly from the tradition of kennings ('moon's soft shape-shifter ... midnight's pale squatter... rude rodent-stealer'). The poem of the anthology's title - 'Where Zebras Go' - offers lilting rhymes and half rhymes and a repetitive structure that children could use for their own writing: 'where the amber river slows / where the alligator wallows / where the cruel acacia grows / where the hippo haunts the shallows /.' The poet draws from well known narratives but offers a thought-provoking lens: take the 'Ugly Sister Sonnet' (p.36): 'Born plain, we pinch to watch her blue eyes fill, / Buy a cat to kill the mice she adores...' and the Pied Piper's wife (p.42) adds layers to the tale with her opening line: 'No, not the first strange thing / he'd brought back./ Unicorns, rare even then, flocks of dragons/and skulls of red foxes,/ grey mountain wolves...'. In a similar vein, there is the almost inevitable list poem - but it is a list with a difference: 'Twenty ways to avoid monsters and mythical beasts' (p.44) includes the warning 'If your name is Beauty make it clear you hate roses, unless they've come from a shop.'. As well as a rich range of topics (animals, weather, the nature of poetry, dinosaurs, the state of the planet, sport...), the collection offers a medley of moods - from the downright funny (as in 'Twenty ways...' above) to quiet tenderness as captured in the final poem 'The Kiss' (p.92): 'Some things, she said, cannot be owned, / then gave me a kiss. I have it still.' 96 pages / Ages 8-11 years / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, consultant. - KARL NOVA: RHYTHM AND POETRY, illus by Joseph Witchall, published by Caboodle Books Review: This is Hip Hop artist and poet, Karl Nova's first collection of poetry for young people. Aptly titled Rhythm and Poetry, it offers insights into Nova's life, recounted energetically in rap (hence the acronym from the title). Almost as important as the raps themselves, are the illuminating commentaries that he provides. Arguing that rap, at its best, is 'one of the highest forms of poetry and is the voice of this generation', he goes on to say 'I am now an artist myself that participates in the culture and art form of stitching and weaving words together to tell my own story'. And very good stitching and weaving it is too! The opening poem - 'Poetry?' (p.8) - is an exuberant celebration of his coming of age as a rap fan: 'It's like I woke up / from being fast asleep / everything seemed to slow down / I felt my heart leap /. Read in conjunction with 'Rhythm and Poetry' (p.55), rap's transforming quality is celebrated. Look also at 'My address' (p.10): 'in conversation I'm soft spoken, very calm / but I speak with strength when the mic is in my palm /'. In the introduction Nova says 'I use poetry to say what is hard to say in any other way...to make sense of all the thoughts in my head and feelings in my chest..'. The idea of making sense recurs in poems recalling childhood incidents; 'The Chase' (p.20) and 'The Puddle' (p.21) both chart unresolved memories: was he really chased by a dog? Who did push him (at the age of 7) into a puddle? Calling his poems 'lyrical pictures', Nova explains that he wants to 'capture moments like when I take photographs'. Indeed in 'Rhythm and Poetry' (p.55) he makes an apt analogy: 'like Banksy I'm a street artist / peep my graffiti / I make 'em with pens and pads / not spray cans, do you read me?/'. The vivid picture he captures of a breakdancer in New York ('The Dancer', p.17) is a wonderful example of such a lyrical picture: 'He was spinning on his head / then suddenly he paused / He twisted his arms and legs to the rhythm / He was popping and locking / to beats from a sound system /'. Joseph Witchall's depiction of the dancer - in common with others in the collection - is edgy and angular: these are illustrations with attitude. Young people will empathise with the light-hearted tone of 'Homework' (p.13): 'I'd rather be on Facebook / or chatting on WhatsApp / then scroll through Instagram / or spend time on snapchat/'. Direct engagement: 'have YOU done YOUR homework? And what are YOUR distractions?'. On a more serious note, 'Peer Pressure' (p.33) addresses a significant issue for pupils: 'The fear of being left out is what it is all about / No one wants to get laughed at or be the odd one out / Touchingly, the final poem in the collection is actually 'My first rap verse ever' (p.94). Written when he was 14, he comments that he doesn't think the piece is good but it was important because 'We all have to start somewhere and that was my starting point. We are glad he did start. For a collection with verve and vigour, look no further. 96 pages / Ages 10+ / Reviewed by Alison Kelly, consultant.

External Link

www.clpe.org.uk/poetryline/clippa