We Are Family, Six Kids and a Super-Dad

This is Oliver Sykes’ first poetry collection – a poetry adventure, as it appears on the cover. And what a remarkable first collection it is. With sustained energy and insight, and an apparently inexhaustible joy in rhyme, Oliver celebrates his childhood growing up poor in a family of six with a single dad. He pays tribute to his resourceful dad and his siblings in over fifty poems about survival against the odds. The collection begins on the day that mum leaves home and there are six weeks to wait before the first benefit payment arrives: ‘Mum was gone. Yes, that was true/ And it was awfully sad./ But the rest of us were closer now/ And it didn’t feel so bad,/ Not with my five super-siblings and/Our amazing Super-Dad.’ There are pen portraits of all the members of the family; poems about the horrors of living on very little, In our Bowls of Rabbit Stew, I Hate Nettle Soup and Every Day is Pancake Day; about the, sometimes fraught, relationships with siblings, ‘I swear HE’ll tell you anything/to see me get told off!’; about the weight of responsibility felt by a child, ‘But I mustn’t fret/I mustn’t get mad/I’ll always have love/As long as there’s Dad.’; the extra support to be found at school – Help me where others have not and Inching my way towards my first-ever/Free school meal ;and the need to have time to yourself – ‘When you come from a big family/It’s important not to whine/But what’s even more important is/That you find space and time.’ In their energy, child’s eye view, and humour, some of the poems remind me of Michael Rosen’s early collections, as Ian Morris’s illustrations remind me of Quentin Blake’s. But there is a greater range here and an intention to speak up for families like the poet’s. It is summed up in the last poem, As Rich as Me, when the poet speaks as adult writer to adult reader (with the first trace of bitterness?): ‘So when you talk of your childhood/…Remember this!/You may have had more money,/But you weren’t as rich as me!’ It’s hard to see how he could have made his case any better.