England: poems from a school

Clanchy, K. (2018) England: poems from a school. Picador, London, UK, pp80. ISBN 9781509886609

Abstract/Summary

Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages – and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in the Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group’), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary. In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. In England: Poems from a School, you will find poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it.