Poem of the Week 53 : 'Leaving School'

Our 53rd Poem of the Week (and our first this term) is 'Leaving Home' by Hugo Williams, in which the eight-year old Williams is bewildered by all the strange procedures and customs of his new boarding school. Maybe an appropriate start to the new school year.

On the Poetry Archive site, you can listen to Williams reading four other poems - 'When I Grow Up', 'Dinner with my Mother', 'Prayer' and 'Her News'. The site points out that :-

The quality of the writing itself embodies a similar tension, employing an informal diction, but subject to rigorous re-drafting. Like the casual elegance he was taught to emulate as a boy, Williams's own reading of his work is an artless art, his precise tones providing enough context to illuminate the poems but without adding to their creative autobiography.

Read a recent interview with Williams in The Guardian here.

We post each Poem of the Week around the school, and use them in English classes too. See a post here about the beginning of the idea.