This book is so much fun! The Editor, Jim Haynes, has collected over SIX HUNDRED poems in it, including a mix of old favourites (see if your parents and grandparents know them!) and more modern verse including games and chants, limericks, nonsense verse, poems about animals and birds, gross and gruesome poems … and more!
Here are a few of our favourites (but with over 600 poems, there are many more to choose from):
Fancy Dress (Anonymous)
There once was a fellow named Paul
Who went to a fancy dress ball.
He thought he would risk it
And go as a biscuit,
And a dog ate him up in the hall.
—
The Drovers by CJ Dennis
Out across the spinifex, out across the sand,
Out across the saltbush to Never Never land
That’s the way the drovers go, jogging down the track,
That’s the way the drovers go. But how do they come back?
Back across the saltbush from Never Never land.
Back across the spinifex, back across the sand.
—
Why? (Anonymous)
Why does a clock face not have a nose?
Why do foothills not have toes?
Do all-day laundries close at night?
Will the teeth on a garden rake ever bite?
Why can’t a needle wink its eye?
Why can’t the wings of a building fly?
What is the sound of a gum tree’s bark?
Can you leave your car in a national park?
—
I’m pretending not to notice the poem by Hilaire Belloc on page 334 called ‘Rebecca (Who Slammed Doors For Fun And Perished Miserably)’. Do you know it?
Tell us your favourite poem, and we can celebrate [Inter]national Poetry Month together!
~ Rebecca, Editor, Alphabet Soup magazine
Big Book of Verse for Aussie Kids, edited by Jim Haynes, Allen & Unwin, 2009
alphabetsoup.net.au 