About me…
Hello! I am Liz Brownlee, a British poet and author – I write mainly children’s poetry. I have poems in over 60 anthologies.
I live in a 400 year old cottage in a village with my husband Peter, who is a wildlife film editor mainly for the BBC. We have two children who have grown up, our daughter lives a few miles away and our son is at university. We have a cat, Milla, and a dog, Lola – Lola is a medical alert dog, and she alerts me if I have low or high blood sugar, as I have no warning symptoms.
I love writing about animals and so this became the subject for my new book, Animal Magic — Poems on a Disappearing World. When I started the research, I noticed early every creature was threatened in some way – so my book became not just a poetry book, but poems and fascinating facts about animals, including their endangered status.
Animal Magic is below – many of the poems inside are illustrated by talented artist Rose Sanderson, who also painted the red-crowned cranes so beautifully on the cover.
I hope you enjoy looking through this blog – it has poems, information, links to my website with a magnetic poetry game and videos and animations of poetry and more – and also pages about my alert dog Lola.
.
Animal Magic is available from IRON Press and Amazon.
what a lovely blog Liz and also a beautiful little Lola you have
Thank you! She is scrummy!
OMG i wanna wrap my arms around Lola!
Ah, if you ever meet her, that will be easy, she is the world’s cuddliest dog!
wow. Did you draw the cover? :O
I did not! The cover illustrates one of the poems, about the red-crowned crane. I wrote the poem after watching a film of them dancing – in the dance, the necks of the cranes formed a heart together. So I wanted a painting of that – but the artist (Rose Sanderson) needed a source photograph. It took me weeks to find one! But I did – by searching Flikr, I found the perfect photo, taken by Dorit Bar-Zakay, a woman who lives in Tel Aviv and who had taken the photo on the Japanese island of Hokkaido where the cranes live. She kindly gave Rose permission to use her photo as the source of the beautiful painting on the cover of my book. Although I love drawing, I am a poet not an artist!
Name that Tuna
Skipjack, Albacore
Blue or Yellow Fin
Served up as sushi
Preserved in a tin
Rhomboidal profile
Sport angler’s delight
Two hundred pounds you weigh
And put up quite a fight
Fastest of swimmers
You can’t escape the nets
Destined to be dinner
For humans and their pets
written by David C Johnson ©April 2013
Great theme for A-Z – nice blog/web site – I like the endangered animal poetry theme.
Thank you Alison!