The River's a Singer Selected Poems

This attractively produced paperback brings together a selection of poems by Valerie Bloom, one of the best known and established poets writing for children today. She is winner of the CLiPPA Children’s Poetry Prize for Stars with Flaming Tails. Here is a fresh selection of her poems drawn from earlier collections reminding us of her charm, versatility and ability to create poems that will immediately resonate with a child audience. Valerie Bloom’s poems are beautifully crafted and designed to capture the attention through words creating subtle rhyme and rhythm.  There is plenty of humour to attract the young, humour that often looks to word play for its effect. There are poems that look to the natural world, funny poems, mini stories, poems about the family – especially her Jamaican granny. There are short poems, haikus, longer poems – a whole variety of forms. Her language is direct, immediate, and contemporary. But she also writes using the Jamaican patois of her childhood, poems that demand to be spoken aloud. The illustrations decorating the pages capture the liveliness, the fun in the verses, picking up details with a delicate touch that enhance lines that already dance off the page.

Valerie Bloom can be found on the Children’s Poetry Archive where you can hear her reciting The River’s a Singer, Granny Is and Autumn Gilt all featured in this collection; a real treat.