Contents: Pages. Introduction

1.2 .The influence on children’s poetry.
It is no wonder that Brian Patten’s poems appeal to both children and adults – he is a great example of the importance of keeping a childlike wonder when looking at the world, and in holding on to the ability to dream and imagine. Brian’s poems are full of imagination, whether telling a story about a dragon that is also a story about love, or teaching a lesson to the cold-hearted Minister for Exams.
Brian’s interests are wide-ranging even when he sticks close to home, and whether he is talking about how little you can tell about someone’s talents by looking at marks on a piece of paper, or being inspired to travel to far-away places by a teacher, his poems are always open windows onto a new world of experiences and possibility.
Brian is a brilliant reader of his work, and his talent for picking just the right tone of voice – one minute steely and determined, the next delicate and quiet – makes him not only a perfect way of hearing his work’s rich rhymes and images but also an ideal guide to seeing the world in new ways
Brian has written for adults as well as children and has been given many honours, including the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in 2001.Brian's recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 4 August 2005 at The Audio Workshop, London, UK and was produced by Richard Carrington. His collection for children and adults, The Blue and Green Ark: An Alphabet for Planet Earth, won a Cholmondeley Award in 2002.Winner of the English Association's English 4-11 Award for the Best Children's Picture Book of 1999 - Non-Fiction Key Stage 2. It was considered the scope and imaginative power of this work to be quite exceptional. Brian Patten takes each letter of the alphabet, presented by Sian Bailey as a work of art, in the fashion of the key letter of a medieval manuscript, and explores fascinating aspects of our planet from the origins of the earth to the development of the child in the womb
CHAPTER 2.
2.1.The main ideas of Brain Patten’s poems.
Brian Patten was a member of a famous trio of poets in Liverpool, England following on the heels of the Beatnik Generation. They performed their poetry spoken aloud for live audiences. They precede the era of the poetry slam, but they doubtless influenced its inception. Patten is the naturalist among them, preferring to examine humanity as a product of nature rather than as a complex social construction or a spiritual force.
He devotes most of his poems to relationships -- first loves, lost loves, and heartbreaks. His narrators are generally unspecified but masculine. Through reflection he arrives at conclusions which place the speaker in the apologetic position. His narrators conclude that they are responsible for the faults in their relationships for various reasons.
Time is the other predominant concern of Patten's work. He was not a young man by the time he began to be recognized for his poetic prowess, so his age seems to have been riding on the forefront of his mind at all times. He is concerned about the progress of time. At certain points, he hints at the cruel trick that aging plays on memory, stealing the memorialized possessions of its inhabitants. Although Patten never overtly complains about aging, he devotes many words to the concept of death. Some people claim that all poetry is ultimately about death, which may be extended to all art as well. In Patten's case, there is no escaping the reality of mortality.
The main themes that Brain Patten focused on:
Romantic Love
Patten expresses a general preoccupation with romantic love in a majority of his poems. Along with affection, he expresses the heartbreak of longing, disappointment, and regret connected to the various objects of affection. The women mentioned are loosely described and generally self-admitted to be figments of the imagination, the perfected versions of women his narrators actually love. When romance enters the scene, inevitably heartbreak follows. No protagonist is allowed to escape a love affair unscathed or happily. Much of the ideas communicated relate to the painful and difficult nature of loving somebody after the romance fades.
Age
As Patten himself has aged, his poems have turned to ideas surrounding age and death. Everyone dies. It's inescapable. Why do people struggle to make peace with this concept? Patten may not know the answer, but he sure explores the question. He features graveyards and lost lovers and his own gradual progression toward the grave. Patten does not seem to fear death so much as loathe the loss of his former physical prowess. As his joints ache and creak, he remembers a time when he didn't notice they even existed. Here too is a hint of regret only recently discovered, regret for wasted time.
Temporality
Similar to the aging theme, temporality features prominently in Patten's poetry. He devotes multiple poems to discussing how things fade and disappear, from beauty to friends to joy and the like. In the poem "One Another's Light" there's a hint that Patten's memory may be failing him. He talks about losing people's faces and not recalling locations of important life events. Time rolls on, but sometimes someone forgets that it ever began and that it must end. Patten remains thoroughly conscious of the temporary nature of life, taking time to memorialize certain experiences and ideas which he hopes not to be forgotten