Ask two poets what their first drafts look like, and you’ll get wildly different answers. From typed pages with delicate annotation to hasty scribbles in a dog-eared notebook, drafts can tell us so much more about poems – and their poets – than their final, published versions. Diverse themes including love, inequality, and the natural world bring together some of the most culturally significant and emotionally affecting poems in the British Library’s collections and beyond. These carefully selected drafts are written on materials ranging from school exercise books to mulberry bark to Holloway prison toilet paper. They include not only English and American poetry, but also drafts in Amharic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Persian, Thai and Sanskrit. Expert commentary explains the provenance of the manuscripts, as well as the secrets they reveal about the writing process. Previously unpublished early drafts by practising poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, Simon Armitage, Pascale Petit and Hollie McNish are accompanied by new reflections from the poets themselves on their inspiration and craft.

This unique resource comprises a therapeutic workbook and storybook, designed to be used as an early intervention with children within the school setting who display concerning sexual behaviour. The workbook contains a series of activities with accompanying user-friendly advice including how to broach difficult subjects, how to engage with children who have additional needs and how to create conditions of safety to enable the necessary conversations and activities to happen. The programme of work culminates in the creation of a unique and dynamic Safety Plan which is developed collaboratively with the child (as the expert) together with key adults in their lives. The Safety Plan is designed to meet the needs of the child and gives attention to their cultural context and specific likes/interests; this ultimately keeps them and other children safe from further incidents or allegations of sexually concerning behavior. The accompanying storybook, 'Billy and the Tingles' employs narrative therapy, telling the story of a child with sexually concerning behaviour and addressing contemporary issues of exposure to pornography.

Poetry. BIRD BOOK is written in collaboration with a field guide to North American birds. Each page both borrows and departs from language found in an individual bird entry. The resulting text is an investigation into dissolved and dissolving narrative, into the permeable boundaries between "human" and "natural," and into the partial and shifting nature of narrative and memory themselves, "wet and traveling maps." Here, as in bird song, gap and repetition create their own story. To welcome "accidental field," "to take the songbird out of your mouth," to examine the ever-shifting relationship between what we receive and what we project, is to move through a porous and shared space, affecting and affected, where "yellow spectacle" hovers over "a suggested house": "exuberant ground."

"Laura Walker's atlas is sung and wrung out of a deep listening to every word, and this is rare. The poems are full of dirt, weeds and butternut squash, but even if the place from which (not of which) Walker writes were full of skyscrapers or stripmalls, her connection to her language and her materials would be as particular, as true. Such singularity of connection (actual!) opens the field of meaning and experience for the reader coming into it, to gather and move, to suffer in spells and flower 'in the greening and the sound.'"--Lisa Fishman, author of "The Happiness Experiment"
Praise for previous work:
"There is an intimate lilt, an indelible charm, a bygone narrator...in Laura Walker's elegant collection. Her tangibility of voice seems to know a listener. Conversation dares with an undone presence. In other words, you can put your feet up. You can find shade."--Laynie Browne, "Poetry Project Newsletter"