Hello H2O

Publisher: Hodder Children's Books

Delighting in the wonder and oddities of science, from physics to weather, chemistry to robotics and most things along the way, Hello H2O is a brilliant collection of poems from John Agard that take a traditionally un-poetic subject – science – and imbue it with the sense of the marvellous it truly deserves.

From ‘Atmospheric Traveller’ in which Agard lists the epic sounding different levels of the earth’s atmosphere and concludes he’d rather be in the one where gravity rules, to the playful ‘It’s Shining Watermelons’ where he describes just why eating a watermelon is more like consuming a slice of sun than you think, Agard’s reach and range of scientific facts is impressive, from the microbes living in the Dead Sea to photosynthesis and the names of the clouds. However, as in poems like ‘Consider the Peanut’ Agard also reminds us that science doesn’t exist without the human story, and that many scientific discoveries (such as George Washington Carver’s experiments with peanuts) have been made by people who were, at the time, persecuted and not recognized for their discoveries for many years.

Agard’s humour and lightness of touch runs through all of his poems, as does a clever poignancy and a way of bringing our focus back to the wondrousness of science, and of every element of our amazing life on earth. Brilliant.

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