PoetryIf some word-gobbling wizard came and snatched all the poems out of this new anthology, it would still be a pleasure to browse through. In Something Beginning with P, illustrators Alan Clarke and Corrina Askin, and the design team at the O'Brien Press, have made every page a dramatic, often zany display of characters, creatures and tumbling objects, all in spectacular colours.
Opening the pages at random is probably the best way to read this book. Wisely, the editor, Seamus Cashman, hasn't grouped the poems according to subject or mood, so you can find a touchingly sad poem about a dead rabbit on one page, and a hilarious one about head lice on the next.
Yes, head lice! Terry McDonagh shows that even these can be a topic for a poem, while other unlikely subjects in the book include a smouldering cigarette, a belly button, a pressure cooker, and a crapping dog. I'm pleased to say the days are gone when the only themes allowed in poetry were solemn or lyrical.
There are some beautiful and moving poems in the book: Chris Agee writes of the memory of a dead four-year-old child, Padraig J. Daly of an old woman leaving to go into a nursing home, and Moyra Donaldson about a child overhearing the fierce fights of parents who pretend nothing is wrong.
More than 100 poets were specially commissioned to write for this collection, including Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, John Montague, Julie O'Callaghan and Paul Muldoon.
There are a dozen poems in Irish, with translations: one is a lovely nonsense verse by Máire Mhac an tSaoi, which ends:
What are we doing yesterday, Granda?
The same as we did tomorrow, children!
There are even two poems in text-message language, and a number where graphic artist Emma Byrne has played around with type-faces and sizes of print to make an alphabetic riot.
Animals both real and fanciful are well featured. Eamonn Wall writes of a white cat called Ghostie who treads and nuzzles all over a girl's homework books, Larry O'Loughlin of a hippo longing to make his girlfriend his Hippopotamissus. There are poems about a seal pup, a heron, a unicorn, a whale, and a giraffe who lives in a shoe.
That much admired and recited cat, Pangur Ban, gets a whole new lease of life in Iggy McGovern's poem, 'Pangur Ban's Revenge'. "Never mind my soppy name,violence is my favourite game," says Pangur, as he goes on to trip up his monkish master who is fleeing Viking raiders:
Master tumbles to the ground
masterpiece becomes unbound.
Master meets an awful fate
(one that I will not relate
it would only make you squirm)
Nor indeed will I confirm
rumours of a cat who sells
bits of the real Book of Kells!
My personal award for Best Beginning to a Poem must go to Rita Ann Higgins: "The only thing I liked about my father was his handwriting".
The most fanciful encounter must be Sydney Bernard Smith's 'The Day the Dalai Lama Met the Pope', which has Chairman Mao musing: "I wonder how their doctrines will agree. Of course there is no god - and if there was it would be me . . . "
Like children themselves, this anthology sets no boundaries to where the imagination can go. I have always found when reading to audiences in schools or libraries, that however fantastic and eccentric the stories and the images, the children are never going to take the sensible adult-style view, "Well, of course, that couldn't happen in real life". In terms of a poem or story and their reactions to it, the life of the imagination is as real as anything else.
More power to poets! Their efforts have made a most entertaining anthology, and one which hopefully will encourage children to make their own experiments with the wizardry of words.
Gordon Snell is the author of novels, plays and books of verse for children
Something Beginning with P: New Poems from Irish Poets Edited by Seamus Cashman. Illustrated by Corrina Askin and Alan Clarke O'Brien Press, 160pp. €27.95