Read Me: A Poem a Day for the National Year of Reading

A good idea, presented in an accessible format for older primary school children. The book has been put together to provide a resource for teachers to use in class as part of the Literacy Hour. It features poems for every season and occasion and there is one poem of every day of the year. The selection of poems is erratic - good in places, but disappointing in range. There are some new delights like Carol Ann Duffy's 'Chocs' and Debjani Chatterjee's 'My Sari' and it is good to see Sweeney and Stevenson, farjeon and Fanthorpe in the same anthology but it is difficult to know exactly what the editor intended with the choice of poems. The collection has a solid foundation of traditional rhymes, classic poems and contemporary poetry but it does not build on this to provide the farreaching selection it claims to be. Caribbean culture is represented but what about Africa, Japan, India, Native American? I could find only three dialect poems and two of these were by Robert Burns. The publicity accompanying the book says 'From Auden to Zephaniah', but I could not find a Benjamin Zephaniah poem in the book. Predictably, Macmillan poets are generously represented but why do most of these poets have four poems when people like Adrian Mitchell and Michael Rosen have only who? Where is Liz Lochhead, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams? I know it is impossible to include everyone but this selection needs a wider range of cultures, forms and approaches to be truly representative of what poetry has to offer to our children and to the Literacy Hour.