THIS IS THE BLACKBIRD
Poems by John Mole

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This is the Blackbird is John Mole’s choice of poems for children taken from several of the collections he has published since the Signal Award winning Boo to a Goose and The Mad Parrot’s Countdown, both still available from Peterloo.

A review of one of those later volumes said: ‘Here now is another set of luminous and well-judged poems, never a phrase too many, never one short, demonstrating that there is infinitely more to the good poem than the number of words lying on the page. John Mole loves language, uses it with subtlety and skill, and is quite unafraid of making demands on his young audience. The effect, quietly engineered, is always arresting, often suprising. The pictures they paint, the sentiments they express, seem to dissolve and reassemble before one’s eyes as if by some process of magic. There is hope and fun, as well as sadness, in this most civilized collection: the work of a true poet.’
Charles Causley, The Times Educational Supplement

This is the Blackbird contains a number of new poems, and ends with a sequence written to celebrate the recent opening of the Evelina Children’s Hospital on London’s South Bank.

A review of Boo to a Goose said: ‘Here we have real people in real relationships, doing ordinary things, but seen by a poet in a way that leaves room for your own imagination. The poems go on living after you’ve closed the book . . .  the book I’d most like if I was trapped on a desert island.’
Brian Morse, co-judge, Signal Award

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First Love

Everyone says that my girlfriend Gemma
Is big for her age
And that what we apparently feel for each other
Is only a stage.

But what, when they grumble, I have to agree
Is as plain as day
Is that Gemma tends to throw her big weight about
Every which way.

Once when I showed her a shed in our garden
She climbed on the roof
And then when I wasn’t expecting leapt down
                                   like an Amazon
Strewth!

All of my breath was completely knocked out of me,
All of my puff,
But just to have Gemma landing on top of me
Was enough.

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THIS IS THE BLACKBIRD
Price £7.95 per copy post free
Cover illustration: Mary Norman
Publication: October 2007 (99 pages laminated paperback)