I'm a Little Alien

Don’t be fooled. This isn’t a book of poems about aliens or space, although there are some poems with those subjects. Rather it’s a book based around the imaginative life of the smallest children, with poems about the subjects that you’d expect – animals, friends and holidays – but also poems that make you want to move about or chant or sing that are about all sorts of other things (it’s catching). These are short, simple, inviting and memorable poems which celebrate the wonder, variety and possibility of the world. Full of rhythm and rhyme, written to be read aloud, these are poems that children will love to listen to, to chant along with and that will inspire them to make up their own. Only the shape poems require the skill of reading, although the typography elsewhere often skips and bounces as if infected with the music of the poems. James Carter acknowledges the world of school, home and classroom but doesn’t restrict himself. He looks up to the stars and down to the ants at our feet. He muses that a tiny fish may grow into a shark. He packs a day at the beach into the bucket that you carry away with you. He wonders what his shoes will do and where they will go today. He invites you to join his band. It’s the work of a poet who knows his audience well and never talks down to them.