Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs

By Richard O'Brien and Emma Dai'an Wright

ROAR! Now I've got your attention, can I interest you in a book of poems about dinosaurs?
Though they went extinct 65 million years ago, dinosaurs are still everywhere. They're on TV in The Land Before Time, in classrooms and museum collections, but it might still be hard to believe that dinosaurs walked here once. The poets in this anthology bring dinosaurs out of their display cases and into your home, and ask them politely to be careful with the carpet.
Dragons of the Prime is an anthology for children which tackles the big questions about these larger-than-life creatures: what would a baby diplodocus pray for, and just how big is a dinosaur's egg? Along the way it takes in fossil-finders – like the pioneering Mary Anning – T-Rex's gym routine, and chickens who dream at night of their dino ancestors' 'dagger teeth'. There are poems about dinosaurs in their Jurassic heyday, poems about new discoveries and the latest scientific knowledge, and poems about the history of how humans have imagined these amazing beasts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Release date: May 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912915064

Emma Dai'an Wright

Emma Dai'an Wright (1986) is a British-Chinese-Vietnamese publisher and illustrator. She worked in ebook production at Orion Publishing Group before leaving in 2012 to set up The Emma Press with the support of the Prince's Trust. She has since published over 500 writers across more than 70 books, including poetry anthologies for adults and children, short stories, and translations. In 2016 The Emma Press won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlet Publishers. She lives in Birmingham.

Book preview

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DRAGONS OF THE PRIME

POEMS ABOUT DINOSAURS

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for Joyce Junkin, 1934-2018

THE EMMA PRESS

First published in the UK in 2019 by the Emma Press Ltd.

Poems © individual copyright holders 2019

Selection © Richard O’Brien 2019

Notes © Will Tattersdill 2019

Illustrations and design © Emma Dai’an Wright 2019

All rights reserved.

The right of Richard O’Brien to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-912915-05-7

EPUB ISBN 978-1-912915-06-4

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the EU by Pulsio, Paris.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[e-mail]

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, UK

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INTRODUCTION

When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs. While my mum went to work, I spent a lot of time at my nan’s house, reading magazines about dinosaurs over her shoulder and learning their long, complicated Latin names. She used to joke that this was how I learnt to read, and that might be true. But dinosaurs definitely inspired my imagination. No one alive today has ever seen a dinosaur, and this means that everything we know about them is the result of people making up stories.

Scientists make up stories, when they piece together the bones they find and use that evidence to imagine what they might have looked like, how they might have moved. Film-makers do the same, using animatronic models to bring these extinct beasts to life in movies like Jurassic World or the TV show Walking With Dinosaurs. And the stories we tell about them are changing all the time because of new discoveries: nowadays we’re just as likely to picture dinosaurs with brightly-coloured feathers as with leathery scales, and some new research suggests that dinosaurs didn’t even roar. Instead, they might have growled like crocodiles, or even honked like a goose!

In this anthology, a range of poets have written their own responses to dinosaurs and the powerful effect they have on our imaginations. Some of the poems are extremely scientifically accurate, while others are more fantastical. The poets have thought about dinosaurs as they existed in their own time – the Mesozoic era – and about how it feels to brush away the dirt and discover their enigmatic fossils in the present day. Lots of different dinosaurs star in their own poems across the course of the book, so I hope every reader will find something about their own favourite. And if they’re not featured here, there are also some fun writing exercises in the final pages which encourage you to explore your own Cretaceous creativity.

I think dinosaurs are a great subject for poetry because they make us think about what another world was like: our own Earth, but very long ago. They also make us think about language: saying all those difficult names, when all the animals you’ve seen in real life are called things like ‘pig’ and ‘dog’ and ‘duck’, is almost like using a magic summoning spell.

I never became a palaeontologist, like I wanted to do when I was little (I’m not very good at hard physical work, and I know I’d probably just end up breaking something important with a spade). But I did become a writer. Those dinosaur days – building balsa wood models, taking trips to see Dippy at the Natural History Museum – helped to awake my imagination, and I think the same is true for kids all over. My nan didn’t get to see this book, but I think she would have liked it. I hope you like it too, and that reading these poems reminds you what amazing stories are out there beneath the soil, in the pre-history of the