John Agard recently won the CLiPPA (Centre for Literary in Primary Education Poetry Award), which is, as I noted in my review of When Creature Met Creature, an important British award for children’s poetry, It was impressive enough for me to seek out more Agard, which led me to his 2022 picture book Windrush Child.
I have to start with a confession: I didn’t know about the Empire Windrush or the role that ship played in bringing thousands from the Caribbean to England in the 20th century. Because of this, I didn’t know those who came immediately after World War II were called the Windrush Generation. I learned about this in the author’s note at the end of the book. This ignorance left me wondering why the kid was called “Windrush child…” but it all worked out okay.
The stanzas in this book are quite short, about haiku length in many cases. They often seem designed to set up Sophie Bass’s extremely colorful images, which fill the pages and could work by themselves as a mural.
This book is full of love and identity: it is a small, bright hymn to the British Caribbean community, and a pleasant way to learn some history.
