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Peterloo Poets, Poetry Publishers, Calstock, Cornwall

This is the Blackbird
John Mole

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 these 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 surprising. 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

The Balloon

It's all hot air they said
You'll never do it
But now the laugh's on them
As up and up I go
Beyond their ordinary world.

I look down, sorry
For the tilted faces
And those tiny handkerchiefs
Which wave together,
Proud of me at last.

Wherever I land
Will be different
I shall step out
A qualified dreamer
With his feet on the ground.