I Love My Bike tells the story of a girl's first experience with her bike, and is filled with beautiful illustrations and a heartwarming message of perseverance. There's a flame on the frame and I love how it feels from my head to my heels when my feet push the pedals and the pedals turn the wheels. I love my bike. I Love My Bike is a picture book about a daughter learning to ride a bike with the help of her father. It's also about that exhilarating feeling you get when you succeed at something for the first time as a child. And, most importantly, it's about learning that when you fall off, the best thing to do is get back on again! The story is told through wonderful watercolours from critically acclaimed artist Sam Usher, with words from children's poet Simon Mole. Celebrating both family relationships and being outdoors, this is the perfect read for families everywhere.

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem'... Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written – their own poem. Kate's big secret is a simple one: to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn't ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

The day that David moved to Fivehills, The first thing he noticed was the kites. Little kites, big kites Eagle kites, pig kites Golden Frog kites with car headlights for eyes Mirror kites singing the sky back at itself... David knows that to fit in at Fivehills, he needs a kite. But when he makes one, the other kids of the town aren't too impressed. They say it needs this, then it needs that, then it needs something else... soon David's kite doesn't feel like his any more. But David remembers what his Grandpa said - "Let's see what we've already got. More often than not, we'll find the answer inside" and learns that when you're happy with yourself, friends will follow.

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it. Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose. Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.

Recently appointed as the new U. S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry’s ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts. Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.

a href=http://prismmagazine.ca/2014/09/24/an-interview-with-daniel-scott-tysdal/"PRISM International magazine interview with Daniel Scott Tysdal/a This practical guide to composing original, evocative poetry explores all aspects of the writing process-including finding inspiration, organizing ideas on paper, revising first drafts, and sharing poems with others. Accessible and encouraging throughout, this invaluable resource helps beginner poets find their voice and master the tools of the trade."

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poet Mary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter and rhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems from Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts an extraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space. "Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.