Cock Crow: Poems about life in the countryside

Morpurgo has joined forces with Jane Feaver, a former poetry editor and now CEO of Farms for City Children (the charity set up by the Morpurgos to give urban children access to and a love of the countryside), to edit this book in the lofty hope that it will make the countryside ‘feel more like home’ to urban children. The cover talks of a collection ‘of poetry ancient and modern’ yet it feels heavily weighted towards the ancient or at least the out of copyright writers. I’m always suspicious when anthologies do this as I suspect that this isn’t about exposing young people to the classics but more about avoiding royalty payments. The book is also appallingly sparse on women writers. I kept waiting to see Matthew Sweeney’s cows appear but over the page it was yet another ‘anon’. The book is a useful collection on the topic, includes some great poems and is well illustrated by Quentin Blake, but I’d find it hard to get a child to read this, let alone use it to inspire them to explore the countryside.