Shortlisted for the 2012 CLPE Poetry Awards Here Comes the Poetry Man shows a passion for playing with words: how many rhymes are there for the last part of Eloise's name? How many names can you get into one poem? What are your favourite words? Can you write a poem about a beloved cat using a blues structure? It is about the big issues of life - birth, remembering your mother singing, sadness, fear, loss, love: love, that is of friends, family, foreign places, poetry - and a good take-away curry (more lovely words here). It addresses these issues with good humour (in both senses of the phrase) especially in its glimpses of family and school life, from babyhood's first hour, to Grandma and Grandad's golden wedding bash. It celebrates all kinds of human activity: moving house, being in a bad mood, falling in love (though not, please not, with Jenny), loneliness - and dancing the locomotion. It shows that kind of delight in nature that is, perhaps, special to a city boy who began to notice relatively late, once he'd moved to Suffolk, the times when spring came, and how clouds' shapes change, and the way a thaw transforms a landscape slowly but dramatically.
It ends with a celebration of three great artists: the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, the twentieth century poet Charles Causley, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. The poems in this book have all been road-tested many times in classrooms. The book will also appeal to individual children, and to adults too, especially if they have felt in the past that poetry ignores them.
Fred Sedgwick is a poet, former headteacher and author of many books in the areas of literature, expressive arts, education and creativity.
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