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Vivian Usherwood wrote this collection in 1972, aged 12, whilst attending Hackney Downs School. It has sold over 18,000 copies, and became a recommended text on the English CSE syllabus. The poems in this collection are brutal, enigmatic and beautiful. Usherwood reveals his situation: a child in care, bullied at school and at the mercy of an adult behavioural code that is determined to find him ‘guilty’. At the same time there are affirmative moments in which natural phenomena break through and disrupt his experience of a bleak and hostile environment (Cf. ‘Trees’, ‘Rain’, and in the later editions ‘Sun’). His form is unique, a confluence of Jamaican and English vernaculars, and a range of style that moves from something like reggae (‘Mad Man’) to storytelling (‘The Overgrown Pear’) and nursery rhyme (‘Orshe Pogey’). Usherwood was placed in a ‘remedial’ class taught by Anne Pettit and Ken Worpole, who recognised his talent and approached Centerprise with the collection.
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