Hannah Lowe - The Kids

Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are The Kids, her students, the teenagers she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race and their fundamental intersection with education are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. The sonnet is re-energised, becoming a classroom, a memory box and even a mind itself as The Kids learn and negotiate their own unknown futures.

These boisterous and musical poems explore and explode the universal experience of what it is to be taught, and to teach, ultimately reaching out and speaking to the child in all of us. The poems in the first section of the book draw on Hannah Lowes experiences as a teacher in the 2000s, but the scenarios are largely fictitious, as are the names of the students. The poems in The Kids fizz and chat with all the vitality and longing of the classes they conjure. Funny, moving, sometimes painful and always questioning, they capture teachers and their students learning life from each other in profound and unexpected ways. A joy to read. Liz Berry These sequences of stories are a refreshing update to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and To Sir with Love. Each of Lowes sonnets is a blackboard chalked with the tales of earnest teachers, of cheeky and lovable students, of being mentored to become a poet and of motherhood and learning to instruct again.

Lowe makes the sonnet exciting for our age through its urgent, its compassionate, its wonderfully humorous address of the personal and the social. Daljit Nagra Cover photograph by Eve R Light shows students from Barking College at the Anti-Nazi League Carnival Against the Nazis, 28 May 1994, Brockwell Park, London. Image edited by Vicky Morris.

in memory of John Toolan No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep WILLIAM BLAKE, Nurses Song Next page