A Spot Of Bizarre Bird Spotting
The poems that I write fall into many different styles and genres. I prefer to write verses that rhyme and scan, but also write free-form poems occasionally. It rather depends upon the subject.
It seems extraordinary to me that 80% of poems submitted for the National Poetry Prize are free-form and that all of those chosen as winners, and those commended, are free-form verse. The 2023 winner wasn’t even what I would call a poem, but ‘Prose Poetry’, a contradiction in terms.
After our book Never-my-name and Isn’t-me-name was published, illustrator Emily Luke said that she would like to undertake another one with me, but aimed at older children. I thought about the material I had and suggested a collection of poems with the provisional title Bizarre Birds.
This consisted of over 30 verses about unusual and fantastical birds. The first one I wrote was called The Biscuit Hopper. When my partner Eileen heard it, she liked the idea so much she asked me to think up another. I obliged, coming up with The Picassowary, The Electric Rail and The Disappearing Dodo, amongst others. Emily thought them worth a go.
To begin with, we thought they could be illustrated with simple black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings, but colour adds interest, so we thought we’d have colour for one drawing in every two or three. When we looked at the first drafts, we realised this didn’t look right. In the end, we decided to put a single colour on the black-and-white drawings, such as having a river coloured blue. This seemed to work very well.
The book is now complete apart from the cover, which Emily is working on at the moment, and we plan to go to print soon after that. It has a new title: The Disappearing Dodo and Other Awkward Avians. Here is a sample verse:
The Ink Lark
As black as pitch, the Ink Lark hides
In desks awaiting books.
At night he gets in their insides,
Away from prying looks.
He eats the ink, which makes him black.
All writing disappears.
When all the schoolchildren come back,
Their empty books bring tears.
He’ll swallow any ink at all,
From biro, pen or print.
He leaves no trace, or any scrawl,
However hard you squint.
You can’t get rid of him, so dark
He can’t be seen with ease.
A proper pest, the Inky Lark,
Brings classes to their knees.
At dawn, he flies high in a cloud,
The black ones suit him best.
He never sings, least not aloud,
Except when on the nest.
But should you catch one, wash your hands:
His ink may not come off.
For no one ever understands
The mixture that they quaff.
