Songs of Ourselves: Volume 2 (Cambridge International IGCSE)

My daughter absolutely loves this book of poetry. Bought for a gcse course but she loves reading the poems for herself.

This review is for the paperback "Songs of Ourselves", ISBN 978-81-7596-248-4. Although the book title is not suffixed with "Vol.1", it is the companion (and precedes) "Songs of Ourselves Vol.2". Like "Vol.2" it's a collection of poetry, in English, from around the world. The poetry was written in English by English-speakers (it's not had to be translated into English). The oldest poems are from the 1500's and there are a few poems from "still-living" writers.The "Contents" preceding the poems and the "Index of First Lines" at the end is inadequate ... the only basic information you are given is the name of the poet, the name of the poem and a page number; and the only sections you have to work with are that a poem is classified as to whether it belongs to, for example, "the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" ... which could, by the way, exclude the early seventeenth century ... and within the given time-frame there is no guarantee that a poem which precedes another actually pre-dates the following poem.So, with 172 poems written by 136 poets from 14 different countries (by my reckoning there were 95 English, 11 American, 5 Australian, 4 Welsh, 4 from N.Z., 4 Canadian, 3 Irish, 3 Scottish, 2 Jamaican, and 1 each from S.A., Zimbabwe, India, Guyana and Singapore.) you open the book, pick a poem at random and may have absolutely no idea ... 1. in which century the poem was written, let alone the date of birth or death of the poet ... and 2. no idea whether the author is from, for example, the Caribbean, downtown Glasgow or some Antarctic whaling station.One redeeming feature is that there are, at least, 4 blank white sides of paper at the end of the book on which you might just be able to cram some useful information such as supplementary indexes.I'm not criticizing the selection, it's just difficult trawling your way through it."English" poets (from England) are by far the most-favoured ,,, and among the poets (of all nations) who get the most poems represented are Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I (!), Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, William Blake, Alexander Pope, Shelley, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, A.E.Housman, Fleur Adcock, Charlotte Mew, Judith Wright, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, James Baxter, Allen Curnow, Hone Tuwhare, Stevie Smith and Boey Kim Cheng. "American" poets would appear to be better represented in "Vol.2", and the likes of Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas and Robbie Burns appear not to be represented in either volume.

I had to purchase this to teach an IGCSE, it is far wider in range than expected...it will get a lot of use!

Perfect

Great - thankyou.

Love the music

necessary evil for GCSE students

I purchased this anthology to help my granddaughter to revise for her I.G.C.S.E. Literature examination and naturally as it bears the Cambridge University Press logo and legend I expected it to be accurate. Unfortunately this has not proved to be the case. The final stanza of "For My Grandmother Knitting" is missing. I only discovered this when looking at the revision guide for the poem on the BBC Bitesize web site. This has undermined my confidence in the accuracy of the volume and I would advise others to be cautious.