ACHUKA Book of the Day 9 Jul 2026
Publisher: Otter-Barry Books
ISBN: 9781915659590
See also:
The River’s A Singer [ACHUKA Book of the Day 21 Aug 2024]
Stars With Flaming Tails [ACHUKA Book of the Day 16 Feb 2021]
Today I shall be travelling to London for the announcement of this year’s winner of the CLiPPA Award, the annual prize for a book of poetry for children, which Valerie Bloom won in 2022 for Stars With Flaming Tails (see above).
So it is a great delight to have a fresh new collection to recommend as today’s Book of the Day.
Bloom has such facility and flair as a poet and, as anyone who has heard her read aloud well knows, an instinctive feel for the rhythm of words.
The opening poem in the new collection is a case in point. A Poem Can… begins:
Take you where you’ve never been,
Show you scenes you’ve never seen,
Make you laugh or make you cry,
Be plain to see or mystify.
And ends:
Be there in sickness and in health,
For days of poverty or wealth,
For times of peace, moments of strife,
For every minute of your life.
Bloom’s range cannot fail to impress, from the deeply personal and poignant This Is The Path:
This is the path we used to take
that winds downhill and round the lake
where we skipped stones, and here’s the bench
where we would sit and rest, and quench
our thirst with juice…
to toilet humour in Admonition To My Dog:
You should not drink the water
from the bowl while in the loo,
and two reasons why you shouldn’t,
are number one and number two.
There you are — even in her light verse Bloom’s wordplay is sublime.
This new collection is a joy.
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