Sarah Ziman introduces her brilliant children's poetry debut 'Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It?'

We’re delighted to be publishing Sarah Ziman’s debut poetry collection for children this month. The book is in fact a ‘double debut’ (cue drum roll…) as it’s also the inaugural title in a new series of ‘Troika Firsts’, in which we proudly launch a small selection of brilliant, brand new voices in children’s poetry. Sarah’s voice immediately struck us as being playful and inventive and her poems are beautifully observed, with a deft ability to shift between light-heartedness and heartfelt depth.

Here’s Sarah, to introduce her collection…

Sarah Ziman: “Allan Ahlberg’s Please Mrs Butler was published in 1983 and I was given a copy the following year for my eighth birthday. I was already a big fan of the picture books he co-created with his wife Janet – to this day, don’t ask me for a box unless you want to hear ‘A big braahn box? Wiv little ‘oles in it?’ – and the brilliant Happy Families series, but this was something new. Poetry!  

Sarah Ziman

“I knew some poetry of course. There was a poem on a record about a lion who ate a boy called Albert (long, but funnier than the one about a tiger who was on fire) and there were poems about a boy called Christopher Robin who wore an old-fashioned smock, spent time with his ‘Nurse’ and went off to London with the mysterious Alice.  

“But this poetry was different. These poems talked about things I knew. There were no kids at my Welsh primary school called Raymond or Derek but almost everything else was absolutely applicable to my world. I recognised the excitement of the dog getting into the playground, the awful feeling of a quarrel or your best friend going off with someone else, the paralysing fear of nits being found in your hair, and that familiar drawl of the tell-tale: Pleeease Mrs Buuutler... There were naughty kids and tough kids, sneaky kids and guilty kids, plus fun teachers, strict teachers, world-weary teachers – I loved them all.

“40 years later, here I am about to publish my own poetry collection for children, Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It? and I’m wondering what the younger me would make of it. More important, what would I like today’s kids to take away from it?

“There are certainly poems about school days which I hope they’ll recognise – whether it’s having to go shopping for New School Shoes, that Copycat who mimics your every move, or the final Leavers’ Assembly before the summer holidays where you become an In-Betweener: ‘not quite in Year 7, no longer Year 6’ – but Brain is not a purely school-based collection. Whilst it’s very loosely based around a school year, I also wanted to include poems that play with words or with poetry itself, poems about family, poems that acknowledge divorce, the loss of a grandparent or a dearly loved pet, poems about nature – both silly and serious – and poems that are purely responses to those ‘What if?’ questions... What if Medusa sat down at the hairdressing salon? What if Superman was super badly behaved when he was at school? What if you could add together all those bits of time which go reeeally slowly – could you live forever? You know the ones!

“I talk a little bit in the book’s introduction about the fact that I have aphantasia (the inability to create visual images in your mind), and whilst this isn’t explicitly part of the collection, I did want to seed the idea that every imagination is unique and that there’s no single ‘right’ way to think or to use your brain. For example, a reverse poem like Sleep Pattern says something completely different depending on which direction you read it. YOU ARE A READER makes it plain that there are a multitude of ways to enjoy words and that all of them are valuable. In Extra, Charlie, a child with Down’s Syndrome, might need help with some things but is better than the speaker at other things, and in Secret Weapon, we meet an active and resourceful narrator who may or may not have ADHD. The possibility is there for those who might recognise themselves, but it’s not what defines him.

“New Girl/Merch Newydd is not only a nod to my Welsh background, but is also the second of my poems inspired by a friend I’ve known from childhood. Felicity, whose move away I write about in the pantoum of the same name, went from an English-medium school to a Welsh-speaking one, and they basically just threw her straight in – sink or swim! Of course, children who’ve come to the UK from other countries, including recent refugees from Syria or Ukraine, have to do the same thing when learning English, and I hope the format of New Girl/Merch Newydd shows how a young brain can very quickly begin to make sense of a new language.

“I’ve also included a few riddle and puzzle poems. I always found these tricky as a child (yes alright, as an adult too), but now I realise it’s OK not to get it straight away. We can’t all have Bilbo Baggins’ reasoning skills – in his shoes I’m certain I’d still be stuck under a hill with Gollum and a horde of angry goblins! Award yourself a gold star if you can work a riddle out by yourself, but part of the fun can be reading the answer and then looking back at the clues. How did the poet get us there? Would you have described the subject in a completely different way?

“For every curious reader with their own way of looking at the world, and for every adult who remembers what it is to be a child (including, of course, Allan Ahlberg), Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It? is for you. I can’t wait to see what you think!”

Discover more about Sarah Ziman and read extracts from her ‘hot off the press’ book: Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It?