My Life as a Goldfish and other poems

Here is a second collection of poems from the winner of the 2012 CLPE Poetry Prize. Its opening poem, ‘Wide Open’, celebrates the power of the poet’s imagination, and the poems that follow display the power, ingenuity of Rooney’s own ‘magic eye’ as she ponders and plays with a range of subjects and notions, from the rather repetitive life experience of a goldfish to the feelings of a clock on the classroom wall. While there are many poems here that expand on a child’s own experience, like the one that celebrates the properties of a small collection of pebbles, they are most likely to derive from inner thoughts and individual viewpoints rather than collective events. Sometimes funny and often mysterious, they are most often private and idiosyncratic, like the girl who, refusing the blandishments of electric light, microwave and radiator, sits in the dark by the fire toasting a slice of bread or the secret personal treasures revealed in the poem entitled X that marks the spot where the treasures are buried. There are poems about secret friends and the imagined thoughts of animals, about a wolf girl brought in from the cold and (a brilliant one) about a lie as a kind of initially seductive but eventually destructive parasite. There are some joining in poems, it is true, and laugh out loud ones, like the one about a scary teacher that any class will recognise, but the poems that remain in the mind are those you need to take into a quiet corner, wonder at and relish.