Dragon Cat – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Sharp playful poems for classrooms.
Children’s book title: Dragon Cat Poems.
Children’s poets: Pie Corbett.
Children’s illustrator: Tom Morgan-Jones.
Genre: Children’s poetry.
Published by: Otter-Barry Books.
ISBN: 9781915659675.
Recommended for children aged: 7-11.
First published: Paperback September 2025.
This children’s book is ideal for: children who like poems with animals and everyday things that keep eyes and emotions clear and sharp.
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Our review:
A few years ago – I’m at the age now when ‘a few years ago’ might be anything between two and thirty – I bumped into someone I’d been at school with. In fact we had known each other for thirteen years, from the age of five until we left secondary school at eighteen. I wouldn’t say that we’d ever been best mates, but I remember him quite well – a smiling, mischievous lad with a carefree approach to most things. We laughed and larked our way through boyhood and teens. We were both members of the Dinner Ticket Five, a group of lads who devised a fraudulent enterprise of such infantile incompetence it was exposed and the culprits discovered within minutes. We were all detentioned for months (although all I did was buy one half-price ticket.)
When I met him again all trace of his boyhood energy and humour had disappeared. The dead hand of adult conformity gripped him firmly by the throat. I knew that any talk of what may or may not have happened in 1964 would have been met with an icy stare of disapproval. I was also certain who his political heroes were. The encounter was, and still is, a keen disappointment. It was as if an old mate had died and his place in the world filled by this dull-suited nay-sayer, this magistrate.
I think we have a duty to preserve our childhood emotional and perceptual response to the world for our whole lives, or at least for as long as possible. Wordsworth thought that time of his life had ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’ and lamented the approach of ‘shades of the prison-house’ as adulthood advanced. The main point of poetry is not to confirm our existing view of the world, nor throw us pretty nuggets of ‘wisdom’, nor to provide us with stiff to chew up and spew up over some exam paper. It is to keep our eyes and emotions clear and sharp, to show us how language, sounds made by air in the mouth, can open doors to the infinite mystery of life.
Relatively few poets, I think, grasp this completely and manage to produce great work as a result. Pie Corbett is one of them and this wonderful collection should be high on the list of books-to-be-bought of English teachers everywhere.
I’m not in favour of hierarchism in poetry, but look at these two extracts and see if you can’t catch a whiff of Ted Hughes, Spike Milligan or Roger McGough.
Owl
Owl, why do you scowl
from your perilous perch ?Owl, owl,
what keeps you up so late
on night patrol ?
Amber-eyed, you seek
the slightest grass tremble.Left behind
The unicorns were left off the ark
for making unpleasant remarks
about the dinosaurs taking up too much room
Many thanks to Otter-Barry Books for the review copy.
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