Be wild with us
Here is one of my very occasional reviews of a children’s poetry book. I love poetry but it takes a very special new collection to excite me enough to write about it. However, that is exactly the case here.
I shouldn’t really be surprised. Both writers featured here are not only fine poets, but have produced truly wonderful work in other genres too. AF Harrold has written some mind blowing ( and mind expanding) children’s fiction recently. My top favourites are the his two novels breathtakingly illustrated by Levi Pinfold, The Song from Somewhere Else and The Worlds We Leave Behind, but the two illustrated equally delightfully by Emily Gravett, The Imaginary and The Afterwards, are also very special indeed. Outside poetry, I know Dom Conlon best for writing the enchanting texts to the stunning ‘Wild Wanderers’ series of picture books (Run Fox Run, Shine Star Shine, Grow Tree Grow and several more.) He has also authored two excellent children’s books about outer space.
But here it as poets that they both shine. I have often said that children deserve poetry that is more than just silly rhyme and amusing word play. And that is exactly what Welcome to Wild Town provides It has more than enough amusement to draw children in and entertain royally, but it also has poems to make them think and feel, to surprise, scare or touch them, to see things they have seen before, but see them anew. In here are many poems that have something to say.
For a good many years now, one of my top favourite children’s poetry collections (alongside some by Ted Hughes and Charles Causley) has been Manifold Manor by Philip Gross. This new book reminds me of that one in some interesting ways. It is not really that the poems themselves are similar; they aren’t. It is that both collections are held together engagingly, not only by a shared theme, but by the idea of writer(s) and reader together visiting an imagined place. In this instance it is, of course, ‘Wild Town’. There is a wonderfully entertaining map at the start of the book and the sections of poems not only include ones relating to arriving at and leaving the town, but also ones relating to particular locations on the map. This is an inspired way of enticing young readers into the poems and really adds a delicious extra dimension to their reading.
Many wilds
The ‘wild’ that these two talented poets explore in the various parts of the town is, like actual wildness, a quite complicated and ambivalent concept. This wild can involve the natural viciousness of creatures killing their food or protecting their young, wildness ‘red in tooth and claw’, wildness perhaps best avoided:
‘growl and prowl and growl and prowl
the thirsty thunder moon-marked howl
hide in holes or hide in grass
hold you breath until they pass.’ (from WOLF WALK, DC)
but equally it can mean peace and freedom:
‘I’m just lying here
on the lawn
letting the day go,by
as the sky
stays still
and the clouds drift away,’ (from CALM, AFH)
They sometimes evoke the sheer wonder of nature, as in AFH’s CHRYSALIS HOTEL, or its awesome beauty, as in DC’s WILDFLOWER MEADOW,. This is a stunning little piece that shows just what a poem really can be, the essence of something breathtaking caught in a few simple words.
Wild at heart
The collection also contains a wonderful range of structures and forms, with some poems displaying simply rhyme and rhythm patterns, others not rhyming at all. Some employ very short lines, others longer. The collection as a whole constitutes a wonderful example to young readers of the manifold possibilities of poetic form. Many could then provide potential valuable models for writing too.
I love the way that whilst some poems are amusing, surprising and even wacky (AFH’s THE LAW OF THE WILD, for example) others are strangely enigmatic and disturbing (DC’s GRANDLION). Some are simple, some challenging, and some, lik DC’s WILD GARLIC profoundly affecting. This makes this a collection that not only displays the range of possible forms in poetry but, even more important, shows the potential of its content to convey all the wildness of nature - and of the human heart. And, of course, the influence of the one on the other:
‘So wait.
Wait until the overhead sun
erases your shadow
and walk. Let this landscape
draw itself upon your skin
marking the heart
with an X’ (from A MAP OF THE WILD HEART, DC)
And all of this is enhanced by the glorious illustrations from Korky Paul, which are funny, scary, anarchic and, yes, WILD!
Were I still teaching in a primary school, this is a book I would be desperate to have in my classroom. I would share it with children with wild enthusiasm.
And finally
In the mini biographies at the end of the book Dom Conlon is described as a ‘disabled poet’. I could not resist responding,
A complaint about ‘About’
Disabled poet?
No way,
I say.
Welcome to Wild Town
Does amply show it.
Dom Conlon is
A most able poet.