Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all my faithful readers, and even to those who have no idea who I am and only landed on this blog by accident!

My wish for 2011 is to exceed 100 followers.

If you can help me, either by following me or spreading the word about this blog, that would be great!

If I manage to attract over 100 followers - see sidebar for details -  I might even undertake to update this blog more often than I do currently.

Though I wouldn't want to bore people by blogging too often. There's only so much a writer can say about writing before they begin to sound like a scratched record, after all.

But even if you turn up and there's no new entry, you can always feed the sidebar fish. ;-)

Feed Their Minds: Give Kids Poetry This Christmas

Everyone's hitting the shops this weekend, both online and on the High Street, to round up all those elusive Christmas presents. I've now bought, on the telephone, all my kids' major presents. (Shh, in case they're reading this over my shoulder.)

However, I like to feed their minds as well as cater for their sometimes unaccountable taste in leisure pursuits, so there will be BOOKS wrapped up under the tree as well - as there are every year in this household. We live by books here, and a few more never hurts!

Yet even those kids who prefer DVDs may find flicking through a little poetry book more fun than perhaps they imagined.

Especially if you buy NEW poetry for kids - not the old anthologies of lovely but antiquated Victorian verse that most people stumble across at some point and think, 'Ah - poetry for children!'

No, there is new, freshly-written poetry out there now for kids. Relevant, fun, and not always necessarily rude. Creative, and often stunning to read aloud. Memorable, witty, intelligent, sensitive poetry.

So, in between forking out for the gaming equipment and the Barbie doll accessories, pause a moment and think about buying a few smart and attractive stocking fillers as well - a few books of children's poetry from Salt Publishing.

These small books are brand-new, modern, aimed at a younger audience, and with fabulous colourful covers designed to entice kids.

And the poetry inside them is pretty fantastic too!

Try John Mole's All The Frogs and Angela Topping's beautiful The New Generation for starters.

Then there's Philip Gross, John Siddique, Phil Bowen, Robert Hull, Rupert Lloydell ...

And in the New Year, come back and let me know what your kids thought of them. This is how you seed a new generation of poets.