'The Kids' by Hannah Lowe

Everyone has been a ‘kid’ and some part of us remains a kid forever (I hope). As teachers, we often refer to ‘the kids’; Hannah Lowe, author of this year’s poetry category winner in the Costa Book Awards, is a former English teacher, and now a mother of kids too. And she is plainly very adept at the sonnet form, which she uses for all the poems in her excellent collection The Kids (Bloodaxe Books).

She starts with this year’s crop as she climbed the steps of her school as a teacher that first September, appropriately past Shakespeare’s doubtful face to meet a sprawl of teenagers … all back to do what they’d already failed. The first section is all about these kids, and her attempts to teach them, and all teachers will recognise the ups and downs of that experience, and how uncertain she feels. The second and third poems both start Why? (Why would anyone want to do again / the thing they’d failed? Answer - without the grades No one will have you, not Tesco’s, not Sainsbury’s).

Then in ‘Queen Bee’ Why did no one warn me about Monique? (one of a series of brilliant pen-portraits that flare from the pages: read this interesting piece on the level of fictionalisation Lowe applied, and the ethics she carefully attended to). The inner-city school was multicultural, with children from the bloody red parts of the British Empire, and in the pair of poems ‘Janine’ and ‘Janine 2’ she has difficulty with an attitude-pumped girl, late strut-in, teeth-kissing, rolling eyes, / my protests thwacked away like swatted flies, until somebody says that the white-skinned teacher’s dad was half Jamaican, half Chinese, at which point, Janine relents: I’d somehow been excused. I’d been forgotten.

There are many pleasures in this first section which English teachers will connect with (‘Sonnet for the punched pocket’), but also darker subjects, as in the sad ‘The Unretained’ (a perennial thing for teachers: those pupils who disappear into the ether, and you wonder what their lives turned into) and in the horror of the terrorist attacks in ‘7/7’, when a friend of Lowe died, the impact thudding in ‘Ricochet’ onto the Muslim kids when they return to school in summer still in their Nikes, thobes, skull-caps and burkas:-

Monica said a police van took her brother.

The papers called the bombers British-born.

‘The Sixth-Form Theatre Trip’ is funny (imagining her pupils as dogs), as is the poignant ‘Pepys’, in which you feel for the young girl, ridiculous as the Fool, helplessly mispronouncing the diarist’s name over and over again and being mocked by the posh girls.

In the second section Lowe goes back to her own schooldays and her own teachers - Mr Presley, Mrs Vanuka, Miss Forbes, Mrs Bradshaw - thinking of them afresh. Her own mother was a teacher, and later in this section comes the deeply-moving ‘The Stroke’, a chain of five sonnets on her parents: 

I cooked them dinner,

mopped the spills. And when she looked at me

I was teacher now, and mother.

The final section gives us Lowe’s perspectives as mother to her another kid, her little boy Rory, who is at the starting point of that journey in time, my little crooked scallywag, and as happens with many teachers, parenthood gives a new perspective to teaching. She sees a class of five-year olds with their own teacher in ‘Balloons’ and ponders:

But the kids I taught, who came to me at the edge

of childhood - was it really, then, too late?

There are also poems on her separation from Rory’s father, the savagely explicit ‘Zoom’, and finally ‘Kathy, Clara’, about another teacher, this time of yoga, in which the poet is back to being taught, the last line of the book being:

I still need kind and guiding hands on mine.

Yes indeed, we never stop needing those guiding hands throughout our lives - as children of course but still as adults, and then as old people. This terrific book of sonnets memorably knits together all those times of life. It certainly deserves the attention it is getting.