The CLiPPA award (Centre for Literacy in Primary Poetry Award) has reached the grand old age of 20 and is the only award to celebrate children’s poetry published in the U.K. Each year, there is a stellar shortlist which forms a great starting point for anyone looking to enhance their setting’s poetry collection.

This year is no different, with Nicola Davies being the author of one of the short-listed collections. I’m lucky enough to have a special piece from Nicola to share with you all about how this thought-provoking collection came to be and why poetry is so important.

Nicola Davies is shortlisted for the CLiPPA (CLPE Children’s Poetry Award) for her collection Choose Love, published by Graffeg and illustrated by Petr Horáček. Chair of the CLiPPA judges, illustrator, anthologist and former Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell says, ‘Choose Love is angry, compassionate, campaigning and written from the heart’. Fellow judge poet Valerie Bloom describes it as ‘humane and uplifting – what poetry is for’.

By Nicola –

The story of Choose Love actually began with an earlier book, The Day War Came. And that began with anger – my furious and frustrated response to the refusal of the UK government to help 3000 unaccompanied child refugees. The text appeared first as a poem published in the Guardian and sparked a big response from readers. The poem features empty chairs as a symbol of welcome and readers of all ages sent in their pictures and models of empty chairs as an act of solidarity with those children. (You can see some of them #3000chairs on the Guardian website.) When the book was launched, we auctioned the pictures to raise funds for the incredible charity Choose Love.

So The Day War Came brought me into contact with various charities helping refugees. Through these organisations I learned more about the real-life experience of people who are forced to leave behind their homes, lives and loved ones, by the violence of war, famine or oppression, and of the remarkable professionals who help them. One organisation, Refugee Trauma Initiative, asked me if I would turn some of these true stories into poems that they could use to raise awareness and increase empathy. From that core of poetic retellings the Choose Love collection was born.

It was an honour to be asked to retell these real stories, to be given some of the most painful times of real lives, as ‘material’. It was a huge responsibility, which I took very seriously, always aware that these were not my experiences and that my job was to be a conduit for them into the minds and hearts of readers. 

The stories with which I was entrusted were, of course, stark and heartbreaking, but also fascinating. They were not only shocking and dramatic but inspiring, as they distilled human love, resilience and complexity. They lent themselves perfectly to being made into poems because they were already heightened experiences, infused with great emotion, teetering on momentous boundaries of loss, grief, change and healing. 

Poetry is good at talking about things that seem too big to process. It is good at making connections between the surface of our experience and deepest layers of our beings. It integrates the small detail of the daily texture of our lives and the huge rifts and fault lines that sometimes split and shatter us. Poetry works at all levels, through all modalities of human experience – it works with thought, it works with emotion, and it works with the physicality of the body. 

I think poetry matters because it is the most subtle and powerful tool for understanding ourselves and others, for understanding the world and how or where or even if we fit into it. Our understanding can never be perfect, it is always a work in progress, but the work and the progress are something poetry can help with. 

What I hope is that the poems in Choose Love, in conjunction with Petr Horacek’s amazing moving artwork, will open hearts, will help people to reflect. The reality is that nothing but circumstance separates any of us from the experience of being a refugee, and migration has always been, and always will be the story of our species. 

Climate change will create more and more refugees and humanity faces an uncertain future. Old thinking, prejudice and selfishness will not get us through. Only love can do that. Which is why I wrote the title poem of the book ‘Choose Love’. That is not an easy thing to do, but it is so much better than any alternative. To be able to Choose Love we need to contemplate its deepest meaning and make the choice anew every day, every moment: Choose Love, choose love, choose love, every time.

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Poetry is certainly a powerful tool through which to encouraging reflection and compassion. I am lucky enough to have heard Nicola recite ‘The Day War Came’ at a conference and it was an incredibly moving experience.

I am very much looking forward to seeing which collection of poetry wins this year’s prize and am very glad I’m not the person having to make the decision!

Jo.