John Price
Illustrated by Susan M Coles
A pamphlet of bitter-sweet poems about schooldays by John Price (Illustrated by Sue Coles), Bye Bye Blackboard draws on the author's experience as both teacher and pupil. The main body of the book is a series of often comic poems describing the frustrations, idiocies, tensions and anomalies of being a part of the ludicrous necessity known as our education system.
Games Lesson
The cold November wind
freezes your knees,
white and knocking
as you strive to avoid
the squirty, muddied ball
slung about by the fevered few
who see the point
of all the hurly-burly.
Miserably you take root
in the icy mud,
deaf to the hoots and whoops
of the loose maul
which ambushes you.
Bony knees dent your back,
fingers poke your ears,
grunting heads burrow
through tangled limbs.
mud squelches slowly
up your unprotecting shorts
as the scrum collapses
and the damp earth
fills your mouth.
"Get stuck in!" the teacher bawls.
"You're like a lass!"
On such days the only happy sound
is the drawn out squeal of the final whistle.
John Price was born in 1941 in South Shields, where he attended the local grammar school.
He was an English teacher for many years.
His published work includes: The Beasts of Plenty (Macmillan Education, 1977), Suicide City (Wild Wolf Publications, 2009) and several textbooks on media studies.
He lives in Washington, Tyne and Wear.
ISBN: 978-0-993124-53-2
Price £5.00
Published in April 2016
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