Philip Gross’s classics of poetry for children, Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café and Scratch City, set a benchmark in the 1990s for opening doors to rich worlds of language and imagination. Off Road To Everywhere takes the challenge into a new century. These poems grow out of twenty years of creative writing work with young people, inviting readers to click out of passive consumer mode and think like writers themselves.
Sequences like ‘Dreams of an Inland Lighthouse Keeper’ offer games, techniques and exercises to be used in writing groups for many ages. This is multi-layered poetry, playful, thoughtful and technically brilliant – as gripping in performance as it is on the page.
Inviting but completely unpatronising to young readers, welcoming to adults who think that they don’t like poetry, these poems open our eyes to the world and to the riches of language as the birthright of everyone. They speak to all ages, and sit confidently on the bookshelf next to Philip Gross’s prize-winning work for adults.
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Welcome to Salt Kids. This site is dedicated to showcasing new children’s poetry from Salt and we hope also to provide fresh ideas on how to enjoy reading and listening to poetry, as well as how to teach it. It provides the perfect introduction to poetry for young people, offering ideas, insights, performances and much more.
Angela Topping: The New Generation
John Mole: All the Frogs
John Siddique: Don’t Wear It On Your Head, Don’t Stick It Down Your Pants
Phil Bowen: Cuckoo Rock
Philip Gross: Off Road to Everywhere
Robert Hull: High Tide
Rupert Loydell: The Fantasy Kid
OK, so I can speak up first – Philip Gross. I was there when these poems happened, but that doesn’t mean I know everything that’s going on in them, or everything that could happen.
All of them want people, young and old, to pick them up and keep on playing – to write more of their own, like in the sequence of boats made of strange and impossible things. Or to try the shapes and games and challenges for yourself. The poems in this book don’t want to have the final word. Over to you…