Bright Bursts of Colour

Matt Goodfellow's Bright Bursts of Colour is a poetry collection for 8 year olds that swings from a slug pretending to be a badger to some very real feelings about home and family.

What happens

The funny ones are REALLY funny. A boy works out what each patch of his tortoiseshell cat should taste of (milk, ginger and cat biscuits, since you ask). Someone falls in love with a crumpet and carries it around in a locket until it goes mouldy. A squirrel explains why it's nuts or nothing. And a very special badger has one small problem. He's actually a slug.

There are playground poems too. A class watches a baby thrush for a whole minute before the football wins. A boy dives into a pool in goggles that don't quite fit. A new lad describes his thoughts as bright bursts of colour, and is gone again a month later.

Most are short, and plenty are only a few lines long. They're great for reading aloud and easy to dip into. Some rhyme and bounce, and some are quiet and hardly rhyme at all.

Then there are the quieter ones, and this is where the book gets you. A child splits the week between Mum's house and Dad's and just wants one home. Someone sits inside Grandma's wardrobe after her clothes go to the charity shop. A lad hopes his dad will slip his mask off and be silly again, just for one evening.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

A few of the poems deal with things some children live through. One is about a dad who stays in bed after drinking, with black eyes and beer cans. One ends with a father who cycles off from the school gate and never comes back. Another is about child soldiers. They're gentle, but they don't pretend.

For a child going through something similar, one of those could land hard (or it might be the first time they've seen their own life in a book). If you can, read those ones together. For most readers the mix works beautifully. You laugh at the crumpet, then a few pages later you're thinking about someone you miss.

What to read next

If your reader enjoys it, Courage Out Loud by Joseph Coelho is another collection about feelings, with poems about being scared, saying no and finding your nerve. Each one comes with a little note on how to perform it.