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National Poetry Day - Enjoy, Discover, Share
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Education
Great ways to get your students enjoying poetry -
Resources
Free teaching resources to introduce poetry to your class -
Libraries
Resources specially created for librarians -
Poetry Recommendations
40 gorgeous new poetry books for all ages and stages to read, listen to and share -
Send a poetry card
Special offer from TouchNote, in partnership with Forward Arts Foundation -
Blog
Our National Poetry Day blog -
Workshops with Kate Clanchy
In partnership with Forward Arts Foundation -
Poems
Discover some classics - old and new -
News
The latest about National Poetry Day
The Actual
Inua Ellams, Penned in the Margins, £9.99
The award-winning poet and playwright Inua Ellams brings together contemporary culture, classical myth, vernacular dialect and flashes of dark humour in The Actual – his first full collection of poetry.
Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, these are poems of personal and political fury, sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy.
Fire Burn, Cauldron Bubble: Magical Poems
Edited by Paul Cookson, illustrated by Eilidh Muldoon, Bloomsbury Education, £9.99
Can you hear the distant dragon’s rumble of thunder? And smell the sweet swampy aroma of the ogre? Can you taste the tangy tarantula tarts? From magic carpets and wands to unicorns, potions, creams and lotions, Paul Cookson’s brewing a spell of fantastically magic poems.
Beautifully illustrated, this enchanting anthology brings together work from a range of classic, established and rising poets including Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard, Valerie Bloom, Matt Goodfellow, Joshua Seigal and A.F. Harrold. Whether you’re in the mood for a haunting or a spell gone wrong, this collection will have you bewitched from beginning to end!
Poems to Save the World With
Chosen and Illustrated by Chris Riddell, Macmillan, £12.99
In Poems to Save the World With, Chris Riddell has selected and illustrated his favourite classic and modern poems.
This gorgeous collection, Chris’s follow-up to one of The Bookseller’s best poetry books of the last 25 years, Poems to Live Your Life By, will ignite your inner activist with poems touching on climate change, human rights and other life issues. Classic verses sit alongside the modern to create the ultimate collection, and a perfect gift for all.
How to Grow Your Own Poem
Kate Clanchy, Picador, £14.99
Kate Clanchy, as well as being an acclaimed poet, is known for her best-selling memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me and for the extraordinary England: Poems from a School, an anthology by her secondary school students. Years of teaching feed into this practical guide, which centres on the belief that the best way to help people write poems of their own is to share other poems. Here she shares the poems and exercises which have been inspirational in helping new writers to build their own creative practices. Whatever your level of experience, you’re invited to read, think and write along.
Forward Book of Poetry 2021
Chosen by the judges of the Forward Prizes 2020, Faber & Faber, £9.99
Even in the most extraordinary year, the Forward Prizes – run like, National Poetry Day, by the Forward Arts Foundation – can be trusted to bring us ‘some of the most exciting new work in international poetry and to suggest the great variety of what is being published right now in Great Britain and Ireland’. Here you’ll find selections from the collections shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prizes alongside highly commended work.
During the crises of 2020 people increasingly turned to poetry, leading Vanity Fair to declare poetry was ‘having a moment’. ‘Poetry had a moment that lasted through both world wars,’ counters Forward jury chair Alexandra Harris: ‘It has a moment whenever there is pressure and threat, and whenever we want to think carefully – together or individually.’
Tell Me the Truth About Life
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Day, Tell Me the Truth About Life is an indispensable anthology which celebrates poetry’s power to tap into the truths that matter. Curated and introduced by Cerys Matthews, this collection features poems nominated for their insight into truth by a range of ordinary and extraordinary people.
