Poetry For Giving 2025
Clive Barnes with his now annual round-up.
This round-up of the year’s poetry for children and young people is meant both to remind you of the best of 2025 and suggest some books that you might like to give as presents. In the past, we have had a few seasonably appropriate titles from the publishers. This year there is only one that offers the full Christmas experience. Attie Lime’s slim A Welly Full of Christmas, attractively stirs up how we like to think of the season (there’s an unusual amount of snow) and its reality, mostly full of wonder and anticipation but not without mum getting cross. This is for children old enough to have a younger brother or sister who wants a cuddle but who are still young enough to write a letter to Santa. James Carter and Neal Layton’s attractive picture book Boing, A Bouncy Book of Bugs, is for much the same age group and brings memories of summer and a busy insect world. There’s rhythm, rhyme and an enriching vocabulary, with some fascinating facts and thoughts about the environment in the mix.
Thinking, as I may, of poets (almost) old enough, and fun enough, to be Father Christmas, a highlight of this year 
for me has been The Poetry World of John Agard, a collection selected by the poet himself from nearly twenty years of his poetry for children, in a properly sumptuous hardback production from publisher Otter-Barry. Now, that’s what I call a real present! And if you know a child who likes some poetry in their stocking of a Christmas morning, A.F. Harrold’s Pocket Book of Pocket Poems would be a perfect choice. Short poems packed with thoughts both foolish and profound, full of the relish and sometime absurdity of words. Put on your paper crowns, ditch the cracker jokes and share A.F. Harrold at the festive table. Brian Bilston’s Let Sleeping Cat’s Lie was shortlisted for the 2025 CLIPPA. His offering this year is an ambitious mix of fact and verse, A Poem for Every Question. It would be daft to expect him to live up to the title but he does brilliantly, tackling over a hundred and twenty-five questions including Can it rain fish? And how many dimples on a golf ball? The eccentric mix of serendipity, curiousity, and wordplay, not to mention the reassuringly straightforward footnote-like answers to the sometimes-quirky questions is irresistible. All in large hardback format with Joe Berger’s bold illustrations. This should fascinate any child with a taste for the oddity and infinite variety of life.
Before I move too far up the age groups, I should mention the new collections from two tried and tested wordsmiths, On Poetry Street by Brian Moses and Dragon Cat by Pie Corbett. Here’s energy, invention, humour and empathy drawn from years of writing poetry for and about children and spreading the word in schools. Michaela Morgan, too, has been writing for children for some time, so it’s surprising that it’s only this year that her first collection, All Together Now, has appeared. Well worth waiting for and blessed with Nick Sharratt illustrations. Maybe I can also elbow in Michael Rosen’s Out of this World, which I missed last year but is now out in paperback. This sees Michael revisiting his childhood and returning to the long form narrative free verse with which he made his name. Here, he’s not eating chocolate cake but braving his grandparents’ outside toilet.
Now, we’ve reached the younger teens. A few years ago, Simon Lamb set himself the discipline of writing fifty poems using only fifty words for each. Published as A Passing On of Shells, with illustrations by the indefatigable Chris Riddell, it proved how much might be contained in each small space. Now, with Mat o’Shanter, Simon has reworked Burns’ classic narrative verse Tam o’Shanter to feature a reckless adolescent on a bike who has a fateful encounter with a witches’ coven and receives a hard retribution for his past thoughtlessness. Devilishly abetted by illustrator Ross MacRae, the poem, like its original, goes at a pace, boils up wit and horror, and packs even more of a moral punch. A witch of a 
very different kind is impersonated by Laura Theis in her remarkable first collection for young people, Poems from a Witch’s Pocket. These mysterious imaginings of how it feels to be full of magic, shape shift, or listen to the wolves outside, and wonder are they there as threat or thrill, conjures its way into the reader’s mind with a compelling mixture of strangeness and familiarity. Here we are at the doorway to adulthood, where nothing can be taken for granted, where adventure might lead anywhere, or perhaps it’s better just to stay at home. The mixture of domesticity and danger is perfectly captured by Kate Lucy Foster’s illustrations. Best gifted with a black conical hat decorated with stars.
And finally, some anthologies. This is Not a Small Voice is a handsome hardback production from Nosy Crow, featuring Black poetry for young people, accompanied by warm and lively illustrations from Jade Orlando. Traci N Todd brings together a range of predominantly African American, Caribbean, and Black British writing for children. An afterword puts the poems in their historical and cultural context and highlights the poems’ contributions to black pride, community, and resistance. Now two collections for young adults. Experienced anthologist Charlie Castelletti offers You’re Never Too Much: Poems for Every Emotion. In his introduction, Charlie talks about the difficulties of navigating all the expectations placed upon us by others and ourselves and hopes that if you feel ‘the world is too much or crumbling around you,’ then these poems ‘will speak to our shared experiences at the moment you need to hear them.’ It might be said that this is a space which poetry has made its own, and Charlie has gathered an array of poets old and new, some I know well and some I don’t know at all, to witness to the confusion, pain and joy of life. A collection that’s impressive in its scope and empathy. At the last, we return to the season of the year with Allie Esiri’s A Poem for Every Winter Day. This completes Allie’s cycle of seasonal anthologies and, once again, demonstrates an enviable range of reading, turning up the might-be expected (Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush) with the totally unlooked-for (Auden’s still timely Refugee Blues). There’s often more than one poem for every day from the 1 December to the 29 February, each with an introduction that tells us something about the poem and its context. A wonderful cold weather tonic to take one day at a time until the advent of Spring.
Clive Barnes was Principal Children’s Librarian, Southampton City and is now a researcher and writer on children’s books.
Find all the recommendations listed here.
