Green Glass Beads

Green Glass Beads is a poetry collection for 9 year olds, chosen by Jacqueline Wilson out of the poems she loves best.

What happens

So she didn't write these. She picked them, and that's the fun of it. Her own taste comes through in what she's gone for.

They sit in groups. There's a family section. There's one for nymphs, mermaids, fairies and witches, plus one giantess.

Lots of them are very short. Allan Ahlberg's "It Is a Puzzle" is just a girl going round and round about a friend who has gone off with someone else. Maybe she's pretending. Maybe they're both pretending. Anyone who has ever been eight in a playground will recognise it on sight.

Jackie Kay turns up several times and she is brilliant on the toe-curling stuff. In one poem two girls take their first train to London on their own, and one of them chants out of the window at everyone while the other quietly wants to die.

Then you turn a page and you're with Edmund Spenser in a meadow full of nymphs, or with Tennyson's mermaid combing her hair on a golden throne. The old ones and the new ones are shuffled in together rather than shoved into a classics section at the back.

The title comes from a poem where a goblin keeps demanding a nymph's green glass beads and she keeps saying no. That's the whole poem. It is very good read out loud with two people doing the voices.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One girl takes her dead mum's dress out of the ottoman while her dad is at work. Another remembers her mother's clothes catching fire in wartime. In an old poem about fairies, a stolen child comes home to find everyone gone and dies of sorrow. None of it is gory and none of it is long. It does arrive without warning, though, in between a funny one about a noisy baby brother and a funny one about a grandad who used to be a pop star.

The publisher's description says the collection was put together for girls, and the choices do lean that way. There's nothing in here a boy who likes poems couldn't happily read.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who prefers dipping in to starting at chapter one, this is built for it. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems suits exactly the same habit. Langston Hughes wrote all of those himself, and most of them are short, about rivers and dreams and being somewhere you don't yet belong.