They Sent a Cat to Saturn

Valerie Bloom is one of our best-loved poets for children and young people, whose career now astonishingly stretches back more than a quarter of a century. This new collection shows all her considerable strengths. She sets out her stall with the five stanza verse A Poem Can… , which suggests the forms a poem can take – ‘Be recited, read or sung’ – but concentrates on the effects that it might have on the reader, among them, ‘Take you where you’ve never been, Show you scenes you’ve never seen,’ and ‘Be an ally, be a friend.’ Many of the poems that follow do exactly that. A few invite you in as a participant in something unlikely, experimenting on how to make an octopus laugh, for instance. Or sitting next to a vulture at the barbers. Or vainly waiting to hear from the cat in the title poem who ‘stopped for some refreshment/along the milky way.’ Others like The Mountains of the Sky, No Entry, and Revenge offer us new perspectives on things we experience everyday: clouds, rain or the cutting of an onion. And, as in Epidemic there are extraordinary events in our own lives that provide a new perspective. Many poems, like Refuge invite us to stand in other people’s shoes or perhaps, as in Look for me the poet stands in ours or next to us and gives us a reassuring hug. And Valerie reminds us always of who she is: her love of words that seems to grow equally from her reading and from the speech of her childhood: Papa Cookin’ and A Likkle Brawta gloriously celebrate Jamaican culture and family, while Return and Rumbled ruminate with some humour and some sadness on living between worlds. This is a characteristically varied collection and what strikes me this time is the stripped back directness of many of the poems, achieving a maximum impact with exactly the right words, but also how the poet is irresistibly drawn to the jokes and laughter to be found in language. There is a section in the collection called A Little Light Relief that is just brilliantly silly: one example, ‘Should he ask to be baked or fried, Or shredded on the grater? The potato just could not decide, For he was a hesi-tater.’ Can I give six stars?