Valerie Bloom: Poetry, Storytelling and the Music of Language

Born in Jamaica in 1956, Valerie Bloom came to England in 1979 and developed a literary career reaching children, teachers and adult audiences. Her work includes poetry, novels and live performance, with Jamaican patois central to many of her poems. She has made that voice familiar in British classrooms and literary settings, while giving readers a wide imaginative world: family relationships, animals, weather, humour and questions about how people belong. ²

Learning from family voices

Bloom grew up in and around Frankfield in Clarendon, a Jamaican town surrounded by mountains. The eldest girl in a family of nine children, she remembers language as part of a busy communal life. Her mother, grandmother and older brother recited poems they had learnt at school. Memorised passages from the King James Bible also helped develop her feeling for words. Books, newspapers and pamphlets supplied further reading, alongside this experience of literature carried in other people’s voices. ¹

While she was still at primary school, one of her poems appeared in a national newspaper. Later, Mek Ah Ketch Har won a bronze medal in a national festival and entered its anthology. Seeing children perform her poem on television gave her an early experience of writing travelling beyond its maker. The words could be learnt, interpreted and given back to an audience by somebody else. ¹

Teaching, publication and performance

Bloom trained and worked as a teacher before moving to Britain. She studied English with African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, and her subsequent jobs included teaching steel pan and working as an arts officer. These experiences preceded her decision to become a full-time writer. ¹

Her first poetry collection for adults, Touch Mi! Tell Mi!, was published by Bogle-L’Ouverture in 1983. Duppy Jamboree followed from Cambridge University Press in 1992, extending her work into a children’s collection. From these beginnings, she developed a publishing life across different audiences, contributing to books edited by colleagues while continuing to write her own. Poetry, storytelling and collaboration became connected parts of that career. ³

Performance has been one of the ways she opens the poems to new listeners. Her workshops and readings have often begun by introducing Jamaican patois and inviting participation. The Children’s Poetry Archive describes a repertoire drawing on riddles, exchanges of questions and answers, and rap. Rhythms and recurring patterns give an audience something to recognise and anticipate. A listener unfamiliar with a word on the page can also hear its place in a sentence, the emphasis surrounding it and the action a voice makes of it. ⁴

Granny and the work of care

Granny Is builds a portrait through food, work and storytelling. The grandmother becomes present in meals and kitchen smells, preparations for market, washing clothes and catching food from the river. Repeatedly returning to the same opening, the poem gathers these activities into a life. Affection grows through the specificity of what she does. Her contribution involves strength, skill and resourcefulness, with the care of children sustained through repeated physical effort. The reader comes to know her through the ordinary tasks that hold a household together. ⁶

The movement towards stories told outdoors gives that practical care an imaginative dimension. Granny feeds curiosity as well as bodies. Near the close, her own speech makes clear how strongly she feels about providing for her grandchildren. The brief final judgement belongs to the affectionate perspective established by the poem. Bloom creates a voice that remembers through tastes, smells and actions, allowing the reader to encounter a relationship instead of receiving an abstract description of family love. ⁶

Jamaican seasons and changing light

Two Seasons considers what happens when familiar descriptions of weather fail to fit another place. Its speaker repeatedly acknowledges the absence of the four-season pattern associated with colder countries, then supplies a richly observed Jamaican alternative. Rain encourages growth; heat affects roads and bodies; flowers, fruit and animals mark changes that deserve their own attention. The repeated pattern gives the poem an argument as well as a rhythm. A landscape does not lack complexity because somebody else’s calendar describes it poorly. ⁷

Jamaican speech carries the explanation, so the place is described through language belonging to it. The poem’s descriptions involve several senses: colour and movement sit alongside sound, taste and physical discomfort. Its concluding account of wet and dry seasons also includes storms and damage. This is a loved environment whose conditions can be difficult. The abundance of detail asks readers to recognise a pattern of life on its own terms, with knowledge arising from close familiarity with the place. ⁷

Autumn Gilt turns to the changing appearance of September sunlight. The poem follows its effects across leaves, buildings, a bird, the sea and household objects. Repeated initial sounds connect colour with surface, making the lines pleasurable to speak as well as to picture. The final comparison with a colour-changing animal gathers those separate observations into one idea about light. Bloom moves easily between the expansive view and the nearby object: a domestic surface can claim as much attention as the ocean. Read beside Two Seasons, the poem shows a writer capable of looking closely at different environments without requiring one to displace the other. Both poems build their authority through what the speaker notices. ⁹

The river as a character

The River develops a sequence of personalities for moving water. In each short stanza, a new comparison gives the river another role. Movement, the gathering of objects and the sounds water makes become ways of imagining a living presence. The regular four-line units make those transformations easy to follow. A reader can recognise the returning pattern while waiting to discover the next identity, which gives the poem forward movement beyond the river’s own journey through the landscape. ⁸

The ending changes the emotional register. An apparently companionable creature becomes a danger capable of destruction. Because the poem has made the river’s earlier identities attractive and familiar, this final transformation has particular force. The same natural feature can offer music, movement and pleasure while threatening anyone who underestimates it. Bloom uses a form accessible to young readers to hold that change in perspective. The last stanza also alters how the preceding ones may be remembered: enjoyment and caution now belong to the same encounter. ⁸

Novels and longer journeys

Bloom’s novels extend her storytelling across larger distances in time and place. She describes Surprising Joy as the story of a girl coming from the Caribbean to live in England for the first time. The Tribe follows Maruka, a Taíno girl in the Caribbean at the time of the first European contact. These are fictional characters through whom different kinds of historical change can be approached. Bloom has specifically noted the research required for The Tribe. The two premises give young people a central place in stories of movement and encounter. ³

Surprising Joy appeared in 2003 and The Tribe in 2007. Material from the Seven Stories archive, presented through Newcastle University’s Creativity Engine, makes some of the labour behind those books visible. A typescript of Surprising Joy carries handwritten additions, deletions and corrections; a notebook preserves a draft chapter of The Tribe. These traces connect the finished novels with decisions made during composition. They show that a story develops through changes to particular passages, with paper becoming a working space in which a writer can reconsider what a reader will eventually encounter. ²

The same archive includes a draft of Nineteen, commissioned by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with alternative wording in blue and black ink. ²

Writing, rewriting and choosing poems

In her Poetry Archive interview, Bloom describes capturing an idea quickly with pen or pencil, then considering the poem’s shape. Revision can involve changing its form or the language in which it is written. Something begun in Jamaican patois may develop differently in English, or the movement may go the other way. She explains that a poem can require many drafts. This account gives performance its foundation in composition: the apparent ease of a spoken line can emerge from repeated decisions about words and structure. ⁵

She also identifies music as a major influence, drawing on Caribbean traditions in which poetry can involve song and dance. Folk songs and rap contribute to her sense of what a poem can do. Yet her account of writing begins with her own responses: what amuses, excites or moves her. When making work for performance, she may also consider what an audience could contribute. The listener can become part of the poem’s activity, with participation planned into the occasion. ⁵

Bloom has introduced readers to other poets through anthologies including On a Camel to the Moon in 2001, One River Many Creeks in 2003 and A Twist in the Tale in 2005. She also worked with Pie Corbett on a series of poetry books and published the guide On Good Form through Apples & Snakes in 2005. Editing and explaining poetry widened her involvement in literary education. Alongside producing poems, she helped create collections and resources through which readers could encounter a range of voices and forms. ¹⁰

Recognition and new collections

Bloom received an MBE in the 2008 New Year Honours. Her later collection Stars with Flaming Tails, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max and published in 2021, continued to bring everyday experience together with imaginative adventure. The publisher’s introductory verse offers a journey beyond ordinary limits, while the subjects gathered in the book include friendship, food, animals and invented creatures. That variety gives different moods a place within one collection. A child can approach poetry through humour or recognition and remain for something unexpected, without being assigned a single way to read or respond. ¹⁴

The brief verse used by the publisher to introduce the collection turns travel into something impossible: stars provide transport, and dreams acquire colours that can be touched. This crossing of sensory boundaries has a parallel in Autumn Gilt, where sunlight produces a series of visible transformations. In both cases, imaginative comparison gives readers a way to reconsider what they know, following an association that makes an experience feel newly available. ^{9, 14}

Stars with Flaming Tails won the CLiPPA, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Poetry Award, in 2022. ¹¹

The River’s a Singer: Selected Poems followed in August 2024, with illustrations by Sophie Bass. It gathered work including Fruits, Autumn Gilt, Haircut Rap, Duppy Jamboree and The River. Readers meeting Bloom through one familiar classroom poem can discover neighbouring voices and subjects, while those returning to her writing can see connections across a longer publishing history. ¹²

They Sent a Cat to Saturn, published on 9 July 2026, reunited Bloom with Ken Wilson-Max. Its sections encompass visual imagination, people and pets, humour, the natural world and food. The collection also includes a section called Brawta, Jamaican for a little extra. These organising choices continue her practice of offering readers several entrances into poetry, with familiar experiences alongside the possibilities of invention. The new book extends a body of work in which Jamaican language and a broad curiosity about the world remain available to young readers. ¹³

Bloom’s contribution to British literary life is also encountered whenever her work becomes shared speech. Her recordings, readings and workshops offer poetry as something people can say together, with different levels of familiarity and experience. The family culture of remembered poems that helped form her has found new settings, as other voices take up the words and discover how they sound. ⁴

Sources

1. Valerie Bloom — Bio.

2. Newcastle University / Seven Stories, Creativity Engine — Valerie Bloom and material from her archive.

3. Valerie Bloom — Work.

4. The Children’s Poetry Archive — Valerie Bloom: biography and performance.

5. Valerie Bloom / The Children’s Poetry Archive — An Interview with Valerie Bloom: transcript.

6. Valerie Bloom / The Children’s Poetry Archive — Granny Is.

7. Valerie Bloom / The Children’s Poetry Archive — Two Seasons.

8. Valerie Bloom / The Children’s Poetry Archive — The River.

9. Valerie Bloom / The Children’s Poetry Archive — Autumn Gilt.

10. Valerie Bloom — Works list.

11. Centre for Literacy in Primary Education — Previous CLiPPA winners.

12. Pan Macmillan — The River’s a Singer: Selected Poems.

13. Otter-Barry Books — They Sent a Cat to Saturn.

14. Otter-Barry Books — Stars with Flaming Tails.