The red-all-over riddle book

Prize-winning poet, George Szirtes, gives his young audience a box of riddles that will show them the wonderfully transforming properties of poetry.

Characterized by simple and elegant lyrical expression and gentle humour, these riddles will inspire and entertain.

Riddling is one of the earliest and most basic forms of poetry and as such it proves the ideal introduction to the whole concept of poetic writing.

These poems will familiarize readers with the real pleasures of teasing out meaning from language.

They also show that everything is fair game for poetry and infinitely describable.

The most ordinary things are looked at from an extraordinary point of view.

Household objects, natural phenomena, traffic lights, electricity - all these and many more are given a new lease of life.