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We Couldn't Provide Fish Thumbs ¦ Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died

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BfK No. 104 - May 1997

Cover Story
This issue's cover is a photograph of Anne Frank whose diary is discussed by Michael Rosen fifty years after its first publication. Following the arrest of the Frank family and their companions, the secret annex in Amsterdam where they had been in hiding was locked up and everybody forbidden to enter it, since Jewish possessions became Nazi property and were carted away. Before this happened, the young woman, Miep Gies, who had provided those in hiding with food and who had a second key to the annex, risked herself once more by entering it. Miep retrieved Anne's diary from the devastation together with the Frank family photograph album.

Thanks to Penguin Children's Books for help in reproducing this cover.

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We Couldn't Provide Fish Thumbs

James Berry, Judith Nicholls, Grace Nichols, Vernon Scannell and Matthew Sweeney
 Colin McNaughton
(Macmillan Children's Books)
128pp, POETRY, 978-0333654057, RRP £8.99, Hardcover
10-14 Middle/Secondary
Buy "We Couldn't Provide Fish Thumbs (Five poets)" on Amazon

Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died

John Agard, Wendy Cope, Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten
 Colin McNaughton
(Macmillan Children's Books)
112pp, POETRY, 978-0330340489, RRP £3.99, Paperback
10-14 Middle/Secondary
Buy "Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died (Poetry Collection)" on Amazon

Most of the poems in these collections are amusingly illustrated and each is (unusually) signed by the poet at the end, which, along with notes about the contributors help to reinforce the fact that poets are real people.

The popularity of poetry books at my school's recent bookfair, particularly among boys, indicates that these breezy volumes should prove a hit with readers at Key Stages 2 and 3. With dialect, jokes, rhymes, wordplay, masses of humour and few poems stretching to a second page, children's poetry is seen to be definitely here, now and accessible. Very few of the works are ones endlessly anthologised elsewhere.

Reviewer: 
David Bennett
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