Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs

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.

Richard O'Brien is a poet, academic and translator. He has co-translated three books of children's poetry from other languages for the Emma Press: The Noisy Classroom (Ieva Flamingo), The Book of Clouds ( Juris Kronbergs), and Everyone's the Smartest (Contra). In 2017, he won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors for his own poetry for adults, and in 2018 he was appointed Birmingham Poet Laureate for two years. As a kid he once wrote to TV's Tony Robinson with his own personal theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs, but scientists as a whole remained unconvinced.

Emma Dai'an Wright is a British-Chinese-Vietnamese publisher and illustrator living and working between Riga, Latvia, and Birmingham, UK. She uses black ink, dip pens and brushes for her illustrations.