“I began sketching these poems about five years ago after I’d left the sixth form and had a period of reflection where I started to think about what I’d learnt in my time as a teacher, not least from the students I was teaching,” she told them. The poet, who is also a lecturer at Brunel University, London, was interviewed by current students at City and Islington College, where she previously taught, after winning the poetry award last month. In Sonnet for the A Level English Literature and Language Poetry Syllabus, she explores “all summer term reading poems – / down in the mud / of words, wanting / the kids to hear what I heard – / breaking the poems apart, slapping / their parts to the board – ”. In Try, Try, Try Again, Lowe writes about failing exams, and of how “you rip the notice // open, your keen heart pumping, and find a D / or damn, an E”. If gloom / has a sound, it’s the voice of Lerow reading / Frankenstein aloud.” “Even the clock-face is pained / and yes, I’m sure now, ticking slower. Each page we read is a step up a mountain / in gluey boots,” Lowe writes, in The Art of Teaching II. “Boredom hangs like a low cloud in the classroom. A collection of fictionalised portraits of the students she taught, it also sees Lowe write about her son, growing up in London today. Lowe’s sonnets move from the decade she spent teaching in a London sixth form in the 2000s, to her own coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. And it’s very witty and very funny at times as well, and in that sense really uplifting.” Motherhood, parents, singledom – there’s so much in it. So it’s about everything, it’s about love and grief. And it spans so much, in a very concentrated way. They think, ‘Gosh, I’m not necessarily going to get on with it.’” But Lowe’s collection “is so direct that actually you feel that you’re being talked to by somebody. Some people, Chakrabarti, said “find poetry a little bit intimidating.
It has a universality to it – in a simple way, because everybody’s been to school.” And the winner was, for all of us, fresh and immediate, it spoke very directly to everybody. “We were looking for the most enjoyable book, the most accessible book, the book that you would most want to pass on to other people. But the centre of gravity in the room was with the winner,” she said. “It was a vigorous debate, it was passionate, people felt really strongly. Lowe also thanked “my little boy, Rory, who is learning about the world and teaching me every day, and is the absolute heart of this book”.Ĭhakrabarti said it took judges “several hours” to come to their decision. “It’s also a book about my teachers, and again, my deep appreciation and thanks to everyone that’s taught me in my formal and informal education.” “The book is very much a love song to young people and to the kids that I taught, who taught me so much,” she said. Speaking at Tuesday night’s awards ceremony, Lowe said she was feeling “joy, squared” at winning the Costa book of the year award. Words from the judges were ‘insightful’, ‘empathetic’, ‘generous’, ‘funny’, ‘compassionate’, ‘uplifting’.” “It’s crafted and skilful but also accessible. “It’s joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal,” said chair of judges, the BBC News journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti. Judges said The Kids was “a book to fall in love with”.