Poet superstar Melinda Smith launched The Loyalty of Chickens at the 2017 Newcastle Writers Festival. Melinda said,
... there is something about the sensibility in her poems I have always enjoyed. The way they connect everyday life with dreams, nightmares, myths and the mystical, while maintaining a light touch and a sense of fun. Also, cats. And palaeontology. And geekdom - there is at least one Star Trek and one Lord of the Rings reference... Magical story-teller Geoffrey McSkimming, author of the Cairo Jim and Phyllis Wong books, said,
... the latest volume from one of my favourite poets, Jenny Blackford, has just been published by Pitt Street Poetry and is full of Jenny's wry, moving, witty and splendid poems. Congratulations on a beautiful volume! I write for children as well as adults, and the appeal of my poems often spans wide age groups; I'm proud that a poem originally published in Westerly was reprinted in the School Magazine. I worked with Pitt Street Poetry to ensure that The Loyalty of Chickens would be suitable for people from eleven to eleventy-one. I'm thrilled that the Compulsive Reader herself, poet and author Magdalena Ball, agrees:
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It’s rare to come across a collection that is suitable for such a broad age range, and yet Blackford, something of a literary jill-of-all-trades, manages it perfectly. Though her poems are lighthearted, often exploring the secret and not so secret world of animals and other aspects of nature, they are anything but facile. Often there is a dark heart, or a rich philosophical exploration of the nature of psychology, history and mythology. In my experience, children don’t seem to like poems that either lack complexity or that are too obscure, and so this collection is perfectly pitched and may well fit nicely into a curricula sadly lacking in modern poetics. The poems are often domestic and explore the familiar, such as birds eating tomatoes in the garden, constellations, making lunch for visiting workmen, memories, family history, the environment, a range of animals, and of course the chickens of the title:
This must be how Demeter felt,
With foolish mortals gaping at the barley
Sprouting round her treading toes.
Clumsy at best, I concentrate to keep
my godlike feet, striding divinely wide,
from crushing my borrowed worshippers
down into the earth.
The combination of immediate visual recognition with mythology, deep and close observation, and just a hint of transformation that goes one step beyond anthropomorphism, is a quality that distinguishes Blackford’s work. These are poems that only appear simple – the impact is immediate, but the way they open out slowly is deeply engaging.
Feel free to read Magdalena Ball's full review here.
Jonathan Shaw, eminent retired editor of The School Magazine, says,
Jonathan Shaw, eminent retired editor of The School Magazine, says,
Jenny Blackford’s biography mentions that her work is published regularly in The School Magazine. One of the attractive features of this book is the way poems that are eminently suitable for children are mixed in with poems of mature sensibility, with no sense of incongruity. The lovely imagistic ‘sweeping’ (‘the wind is sweeping / the tide out to sea’), is followed by ‘South Steyne’, which recalls childhood events from an amused adult perspective (‘The South Steyne ferry was heaven / for me, though doubtless hell for parents’), and then by ‘Some slight redemption’, a meditation on Coventry Cathedral as a monument ‘not to war / nor even peace / but to forgiveness’.
Anyone who has had chickens knows the fickle loyalty of chickens, how they will press around 'She Who Brings the Grain' whoever it may be, and the challenge of stepping forward without crushing 'worshippers'. Blackford captures the scene perfectly in her poem 'The loyalty of chickens'. Other feathered dinosaur siblings also feature in this book of poems - currawong, magpies, waterbirds, and the breakfast visitor that steals the tomatoes. But birds are not the only creatures that she describes so well, there are also the tattered cat, the ninja cats, the One True Cat, and the total control fur kid, the polar bear terrier, the lap dogs of Paris, and the rat lodger in the walk-in robe...
The Loyalty of Chickens is available directly from Pitt Street Poetry, form Kinokuniya, and from MacLean's Booksellers in Hamilton. Libraries and schools can order it from Pitt Street Poetry via James Bennett Library Suppliers.