Vanishing Trick

This is a varied collection – varied in the sense that the implied audience for individual poems varies from lower primary to lower secondary; and varied too, I feel, in quality. As you might expect, Ros Asquith is most at home with humour and word games and there are poems to enjoy that play to those strengths, but forays into the more thoughtful or, occasionally, profound are less successful; a real exception is ‘Talking Down’, a poem that very simply but unerringly skewers adult patronising of children. I like ‘Best Mate’, too; another poem that says a lot about friendship in a few lines. The problem, I think, is that while Asquith has the ability to see things from a child’s point of view, and tackles a range of subjects and moods, she doesn’t have sufficient control of form, a failing that tends to come to the fore in longer poems. Her metre can be haphazard or fails to be sustained and her rhyme is frequently forced, to my mind spoiling some potentially good poems. Although the collection fairly hums with enthusiasm, and much as I admire Ros Asquith’s work, I don’t think poetry is one of her strong suits.