This is a poem written for my autistic Grandson when he was six. Alfie is non-verbal but still makes lots of noise! One day he was staring out of a window whilst lining up bottles and jars in a row according to size (as he loves to do), and repeating what sounded to me like the words 'Pobbly Boo'.
And thus a poem was born.
If you enjoy reading Pobbly Boo and would like to support autism, you can make a donation to the 'Ambitious about Autism' charity via the link at the end of the poem.
Shepherd is a platform where authors may share a 'shelf' of five favourite books with a theme related to a particular book they have written.
There are Shepherd lists for both Angel's Blade and The Face Stone.
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
“You don’t look like an unknown animal tracker...”
"...it’s a long-time passion of mine. I read the first edition of that book of Heuvelmans’ while I was still up at Cambridge, and it really did it for me.”
“You studied that cryptozoology stuff then?”
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
“You are Jack Sangster, owner of this green E-Type?”
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
“You know of Piri Reis?”
“You had a book on him in your room.”
“I did, didn’t I,” she laughed. “Well, his maps of the New World were based on much older ones I’m sure..."
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
“Speaking the old language, she was,” he said to me, cheeks flushed as he rushed off down the corridor. “The old language I tell you, Mr Sangster, thought it was forgotten by youngsters till I heard her talking.”
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
Angel had done a stylised pen and ink drawing of a fish, but her fish looked somehow wrong. I stared at its downturned mouth, exaggerated spiky fins, and curved form for a moment before realising it had multiple tails, which when I counted them up (three times as they were tangled together and hard to tally), totalled nine.
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
‘Bad crossing over the River Fal at high tide, April 1970’
...was written underneath, followed by the initials ‘AB’.
An excerpt from 'Angel's Blade'.
And the view was spectacular, the hotel looking out over the tidal tree-lined T-shaped confluence of the Truro and Tresillian Rivers, which formed a larger channel that curved out of sight to the south---
--- I had watched this scene change with the passing of winter and the greening of spring, and rain, wind or shine, there was always something different to see.