Poetry workshop: A pudding poem
The proof of the pudding...
... is in the reading, says salivating poet Alison Chisholm
There should be a whole branch of poetry dedicated to the celebration of puddings, possibly with a subgenre for cakes and chocolate. How many readers have salivated over Pam Ayres’ list of puddings remembered from childhood? Yvonne Fee’s Four O’Clock Fantasy gives heightened status to the chocolate eclair. Marriott Edgar’s Sam (the one who had some issues with his musket) accidentally used his mother’s Christmas pudding to blow up the town his unit was attacking.
Fortunately there is no record of a pudding mishap in Denise Randall’s piece, but warmth, cosiness, ritual and a loving family are the elements that animate her poem. Denise, of Ainsdale, Southport, is no stranger to the Christmas poem, having compiled and edited an anthology in 2015. A Robin Called is a book of seasonal work sold in aid of the charity Diabetes UK. Putting it together underlined for its compiler the fact that it’s difficult to find something new to say about a subject that has been written about so very many times in the past. A poem that fails to find fresh material will not find favour; but in 2016 Denise Randall came up with a theme that nobody had offered when she was compiling her book.