Synopsis: How do you decide what to wish for on a wishing bone? What’s it like to swim a mile? What happens when a seahorse and an octopus meet in a dance? How do you make colours crackle and roar? And what does a didgeri-do? Twenty-four poets from across the English-speaking world offer surprising and candid insights into their methods and sources of inspiration in this ground-breaking anthology.

Review: Canadian poet JonArno Lawson has pulled together a great diversity of poetic voices in ‘Inside Out’. Famous children’s writers, including Roger McGough and Michael Rosen, Grace Nichols and Jack Prelutsky, rub shoulders with some lesser-known names. English and American verse sits alongside poetry from India and South Africa, the Caribbean and Canada, Scotland and Tasmania.

Opening suggestively with John Agard’s ‘Old World New World’, the volume is a voyage of discovery through poetry in English and into the minds of its contributors. Most of the lyrics are light-hearted and fun, playing with word and sound, indulging in nonsense and flights of imagination. As a number of the poets remind us, this is a collection asking to be read aloud, experienced with the ears as well as the eyes. A more serious (but no less creative) note is sounded by Jackie Kay’s ‘The Stincher’, a fascinating exploration of lies and their tendency to take on an unstoppable life of their own, to “swell, seed, swarm”, to “develop extra tongues/purple and thick” (pp. 18-19).

Each of the twenty-four poems is followed by the poet’s own thoughts on it. As they reflect on what inspired them (often many years ago), we are permitted to see how scraps of ideas, unusual connections, sudden surprises and “the mysterious migrations of memories” (p. 27) can all lead to the birth of a poem. As they discuss the actual process of composition, we see again and again a revelry in wordplay and a wrestling with revisions “to make [it] sound as if I hadn’t laboured over [it] at all” (p. 96).

The result is an apprenticeship - an induction into the art of poetry and an invitation for the reader to try it for themselves. I particularly enjoyed Sally Odgers’ thoughts on “illogical logic” in her discussion of ‘A Ghoulish Proposal’ (p. 64).

My one issue with the collection is that the page design is off-putting. The typeface for the writers’ comments is clearly intended to suggest a type-written manuscript, but the end result is cramped and difficult to read. Moreover, Jonny Hannah’s illustrations may be aiming to capture the energy and life of the verse, but they are often too busy, crowding around the poem and distracting the eye from the words themselves. Consequently, this may not be a book for independent reading and teachers may well prefer to read it to their classes.

That complaint aside, though, ‘Inside Out’ is an interesting collection which could be used to trigger much open-ended, playful discussion about the art of writing. Indeed, the volume closes with Nancy Willard in imagined dialogue with her poem, reminding the reader that good verse isn’t about right answers, but possibilities, about raising questions, and prompting wonder and speculation.

Elizabeth Bird review for Fuse

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2008-03-22