Shortlisted for the 2012 CLPE Poetry Awards

Here Comes the Poetry Man shows a passion for playing with words: how many rhymes are there for the last part of Eloise's name? How many names can you get into one poem? What are your favourite words? Can you write a poem about a beloved cat using a blues structure?

It is about the big issues of life - birth, remembering your mother singing, sadness, fear, loss, love: love, that is of friends, family, foreign places, poetry - and a good take-away curry (more lovely words here). It addresses these issues with good humour (in both senses of the phrase) especially in its glimpses of family and school life, from babyhood's first hour, to Grandma and Grandad's golden wedding bash.

It celebrates all kinds of human activity: moving house, being in a bad mood, falling in love (though not, please not, with Jenny), loneliness - and dancing the locomotion.

It shows that kind of delight in nature that is, perhaps, special to a city boy who began to notice relatively late, once he'd moved to Suffolk, the times when spring came, and how clouds' shapes change, and the way a thaw transforms a landscape slowly but dramatically.

It ends with a celebration of three great artists: the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, the twentieth century poet Charles Causley, and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

The poems in this book have all been road-tested many times in classrooms. The book will also appeal to individual children, and to adults too, especially if they have felt in the past that poetry ignores them.

This book was recognised by the Clpe Poetry Award.

This book features in the following series: Children's Poetry Library, Childrens Poetry Library .

There are 80 pages in this book. It is an anthology. This book was published 2011 by Salt Publishing .

Fred Sedgwick is a freelance lecturer and writer. He works in schools, colleges, teachers' centres and universities specializing in children's writing and poetry and lecturing on Shakespeare and children.

This book has the following chapters:

Acknowledgements

First thing today

Poem for Eloise

Auntie's Boyfriend

Eloise Alone

My Grandparents' Golden Wedding Party

Moving House

A Disgusting Poem

Favourite Words

What the Headteacher said .

Loving Gertie Best

Fall in love

Notice on a Classroom Door

Leave Charlie Alone

The Fight

Victoria's Poem

Butterfly

Stanley's Blues

My cat Stanley

My Cat Cleaning Himself

Meeting

Some Other Ark

Once there was a unicorn

Hunky-Dory Daly

Under

Snapshots

Three for Winter

Cinquain Prayer, February Night

Thaw

Elegy for Bonfire Night

Three for Spring

Blossoms

Snowdrops

Casting a Clout

East Anglia

The Oak Chest

The thunder to the lightning

In the house there are

Hate sonnet

Mr Khan's Shop

Dance Poem

Poetry Man

`Our God, heaven cannot hold him'

Lord of all gardens

(Kyrielle)

After Giacometti (1901-1966)

Requiem for a Cat