Jackie French's "This is Home" teachers' review

Brief description of This is Home:

In this wonderful Australian poetry collection, selected by Jackie French, you will find a wide variety of poems for students in Stages 3 and 4.  The anthology is divided into sections (each one introduced by a short poem by Jackie French) and the sections include The Nations of 60,000 years, Colony, A Hard Land, Heroes and Legends, Learning this Land, Laughter and many more.  In her introduction French says she hopes there “will be voices that sing to you about our past, and who we are and who we may become”. Poetry is easy to share, bringing as it does, news from the past and the future. It is helpful to think of it as if someone is speaking to you across time and culture and place, in this way can allow the reader to become someone else. This anthology will have special appeal because of its vital illustrations and wide range of subject, tone, mood and form.  

Jackie French AM is the author of over 140 books and was the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2014/15 and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. 

Distinctive features of This is Home:

• Hardcover anthology of a range of Australian poems specifically selected to tell the story of our country to young people and will work very well for students in Stages 3 and 4
• Introductory poems for each section by the author  
• Strong emphasis on First Nations texts and texts that will interest and engage students through their subject, language, imagery and poetic form
• Vibrant, arresting illustrations, some full page, add interest, excitement and interpretation to the poems
• French provides a suggested approach for students to conduct their own search of the anthology for a poem that will speak to them.

• Acrostics
• Alternative line poems
• Ballads
• Concrete poetry
• Couplets

• Dramatic monologues
• Elegies
• Epitaphs
• Found poems
• Free verse

• Ghazals
• Haikus
• “I don’t understand” poems
• Prose poems
• Slam poems

Several of these forms can be found in this collection.  

Jackie French gives initial advice to students about how to search for poems and emphasises that we are all different and what one person likes another may not.  She writes that “We are not the same.  There are many different poems in this book.”

In Where to start, at the front of the anthology, she provides eleven different “ways in” for students with such tempting suggestions as “If you think poetry is boring try …” (followed by a list of poems).  Or “if you want a poem of courage to help you face tomorrow try …” and once again suggests titles and page numbers for students.

Other strategies for the classroom include:

• Use This is Home and other anthologies (e.g It’s the Sound of the Thing by Maxine Beneba Clarke has 100 new poems for young people and an index by poetic form and would be a perfect companion text to This is Home) to create book boxes for wide reading in poetry to provide more choices for students. Also see the connecting texts list of other anthologies below.
• Ask students to create their own class anthology of poems they love from their poetic wide reading and add a reflection with the reasons for their choices. Compile, publish and place their class anthology in the school library for other students to borrow and be inspired.  
• Publish students’ own poetry around the school on buildings and on the school website and (with permission and retrieval after the event) in community public spaces. 
• Use visual representation as it is a powerful way to demonstrate emotions as well as create meaning.  Provide examples in the classroom of visual illustrations and interpretations of poems that students select from the anthologies you provide.  Ask students to illustrate their own/others’ poems to accompany the words of the poems.
• Performance poetry means reading or declaiming poetry in a way that acknowledges the presence of an audience.  Use Readers’ Theatre to make some of the poems in This is Home come alive in the classroom. This can help give confidence to students to transit into slam and performance poetry.