The Mad Parrot's Countdown

The Mad Parrot's Gountdown is John Mole's second Peterloo volume of poetry for children. Boo to a Goate (Peterloo Poets, 1987 won the 1988 Signal (Portry for Children) Award and was one of Charles Causley's Book of the Year choices in the Times Educational Supplemetil, The Mad Parrot's Countdown includes poems written over a number of years and achieves a fine balance between the serious and the comie, the familiar and the absurd. In this volume are ordinary life ghost stories, riddles and puzzles, plus poems about jokes and jugs, heat-waves and hero-worship, classrooms and carnivals, moths and monkeys, and cats and bats. There are also some pig-songs, a cure for insomnia, and a very funny poem in which a child gives a painting lesson to 'Henri de Toulouse Lautrec' who "Couldn't paint to save his neck.