The Humpback's Wail

I read yesterday for The Kingston Readers' Festival - a wonderful initiative run by Sandra Williams - with the poet and writer Chrissie Gittins, in a good venue - The Kingston Museum.  Though the audience was not large (around 20 students and older members of the local community) it was attentive and genuinely engaged, and I sold a half-dozen books or so, which, as any poet will know, is not so bad.  Gittins is a very good reader, and she read from her children's and adult collections.  Her latest for kids is The Humpback's Wail, and I recommend it, for its charming illustrations by Paul Bommer, and the poems themselves.  I have suggested to Gittins that she send her work to Mike Kavangh's increasingly impressive magazine of young person's poetry, The Scrumbler.  Worth subscribing to, and writing poems for.