Tag: Wonder the Natural History Museum Poetry Book

Anthologist

Ana Sampson: Prehistoric Poems for Dinosaur Devotees

Oh sure, a CGI dinosaur eating someone on the toilet is great, but have you ever read a POEM about a dinosaur? There’s no limit to how scary a poet can make a monster, no rubbery claws or clumsy greenscreen behind the leathery wings. We can only meet these monsters in our imaginations and, liberated from the constraints of prose, poets can paint a particularly vivid picture.

In ‘Dinosaurs Walked Here’, Elli Woollard uses heavy language and rhyme to echo the smashing of huuuuge feet into the earth:

            ‘Dinosaurs walked here once.

            Here, right here, on the site of this street,

            they’d stamp along, and the slabs of their feet

            were as wide as a car, crushing, crashing

            a road through the reeds. Then, striding and splashing,

            they’d thud in the mud of the deep green pool

            and they’d clomp in the swamp under new-forged skies

            where now the cold grey concrete lies.’

When I talk to children about dinosaur poems, I love to use Cheryl Pearson’s poem ‘Kronosaurus.’ Its skull was as long as two eight-year-olds, so it’s always fun to ask for volunteers to lie head-to-head to demonstrate just how enormous that terrifying jaw really was. The poem asks us to imagine

            Thirty feet of brute strength

and teeth, faster than a shark,

snap snap snapping at your heels

            in dark water.

(I’d definitely skip this particular swim. That’s me on the beach, reading poems with dry feet.)

I asked my seven-year-old – a palaeontologist in training – to choose some favourite dinosaur poems and explain why she loved them. Little explanation was needed as to why she loved Laura Mucha’s ‘Apatosaurus Rap’… wait for that thunderous B O o O o o O o o o O o o o o O o M!

Apatosaurus Rap

Her favourite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus Rex, so she also post-it noted Paul Cookson’s ‘The King of All the Dinosaurs’ who ‘rants and raves and royally roars’ and ‘stomps and chomps on forest floors’ and ‘Gouges, gorges, gashes, gores…’ – this one is just so much fun to read aloud and, in my opinion, definitely calls for stomping for emphasis.

‘The Night Flight of the Pterodactyl’ by Chrissie Gittins also found favour. She liked the ‘glistening and gleaming’ Pterodactyl as it glides dangerously through the dark sky, moonbeams flashing on teeth and claws. Not a good night to be an unsuspecting sleeping frog in the shadow of those vast wings…

I was thrilled last term when my daughter came home from school bursting with excitement about Mary Anning, who is a hero to her now. Jan Dean’s gorgeous, evocative poem ‘Remembering Mary’ threads us back in time to her discoveries at Lyme Regis:

            The sea’s mysterious –

            iron grey and shunting shingle,

            growling with the roll

            of pebbles pounding in the tide.

            This same long roar that fills us

            as we beachcomb

            this same long rolling roar

            was sounding when Mary walked

            below Black Ven.

            It is the song that shapes the world

            this echoing roar of dinosaurs –

            the song of rocks and sea.

I really enjoyed hunting down dinosaur poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and I also love the Emma Press anthology Dragons of the Prime. And I haven’t quite left terrible lizards behind as my new anthology Gods and Monsters, published in September, includes lots of poems about mythological monsters including plenty of dragons.

Ana Sampson

Ana Sampson is the editor of thirteen poetry anthologies for adults and children. She writes a bookish newsletter with reading and listening recommendations and you can sign up here.

Children's Poetry Editor

Ana Sampson: Poetic Perspectives on our Planet

Poetic perspectives on our planet

One of the great pleasures of poetry is that the poets’ dazzling feats of imagination can whisk the reader under the sea, to another planet or to view the world from another perspective in the space of just a few lines. When I was choosing poems for Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book, I looked for verses that would help me see the natural world in a new way, as many of the museum’s amazing exhibits do. I hoped this shift in viewpoint would encourage children to connect more deeply with the natural world, and encourage a passion for protecting it.

The narrator of a poem can be anyone – or anything: a child, an astronaut, Charles Darwin’s wife, a duck, a dinosaur, a dodo. Children are used to suspending disbelief for the space of a poem, since we have all gorged on a diet of talking animals and magical happenings, often in rhyme since our earliest days being read to. A poem is a portal the poet asks us to walk through, and on the other side, nothing looks quite the same.

One of the poems I’m most looking forward to sharing with young readers is Gita Ralleigh’s ‘Solar System Candy’.

If I ate the solar system,

the moon would taste

strange and dusty

as Turkish Delight.

Planets would be

giant gobstoppers,

except Saturn and Jupiter –

those gas giants

fizz like sherbert,

or melt like candy floss

in your mouth.

The meteor belt

pops and crackles

like space dust.

Comets leave a minty sting

on your tongue.

Black holes taste of cola bottles.

Or memories

you once had

and lost.

Gita’s poem is full of sensory delights that help readers of all ages to see these distant astral bodies with fresh eyes as they recall familiar tastes and sensations. I had never managed to remember which planets were made of gas, but now they taste like candy floss on my tongue, I’ll never forget! The image of Turkish Delight is perfectly chosen, reminding us of the fact that the moon’s surface is dusty enough for us to leave boot prints in it if we could walk around on it.

John Clare’s poem ‘The Ants’ starts with a human-sized perspective. We see the ants’ procession from our usual lofty height. But with the suggestion of a whispered language among the workers, suddenly the reader is urged to swoop down to eavesdrop, and to imagine the customs and commands that govern the intricately-ordered community.

What wonder strikes the curious, while he views

The black ant’s city, by a rotten tree,

Or woodland bank! In ignorance we muse:

Pausing, annoy’d, – we know not what we see,

Such government and thought there seem to be;

Some looking on, and urging some to toil,

Dragging their loads of bent-stalks slavishly:

And what’s more wonderful, when big loads foil

One ant or two to carry, quickly then

A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.

Surely they speak a language whisperingly,

Too fine for us to hear; and sure their ways

Prove they have kings and laws, and that they be

Deformed remnants of the Fairy-days.

Some of the poems explicitly ask the reader to think themselves into the mind of a seal, or a tree, or a lizard. It’s a wonderful way to ignite children’s imaginations: who hasn’t wondered where the cat goes at night, or what an elephant might dream about? Geoffrey Dearmer’s poem ‘Whale’ – with its lovely lulling ‘rise and sink and rise and sink’ putting the reader right there in the waves – is a great example.

Wouldn’t you like to be a whale

And sail serenely by—

An eighty-foot whale from your tip to your tail

And a tiny, briny eye?

Wouldn’t you like to wallow

Where nobody says ‘Come out!’?

Wouldn’t you love to swallow

And blow all the brine about?

Wouldn’t you like to be always clean

But never have to wash, I mean,

And wouldn’t you love to spout—

O yes, just think—

A feather of spray as you sail away,

And rise and sink and rise and sink,

And blow all the brine about?

Asking children to fire up their imaginations by reading – and writing – their way into fresh ways of seeing the natural world can foster a connection with the wonders of our planet. Hopefully, it will also inspire the next generation develop a lifelong interest in protecting it.

Ana Sampson

Ana Sampson has edited eleven poetry anthologies including Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book and She is Fierce: Brave, Bold and Beautiful Poems by Women. She knows much less about dinosaurs than her children. www.anasampson.co.uk.