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Grace Nichols talks about her poem 'Praise Song for my Mother'. Following brief visual images of Guyana, she explores how the poem reflects her family life, cultural background and approach to writing poetry. She reads extracts from the poem to the accompaniment of ambient guitar music and wave sounds.

Teaching English Literature?

This film can be used to explore the metaphors of motherhood employed in the poem. In pairs, students can choose one metaphor from the poem and write it in the middle of a plain piece of paper. The students have ten minutes to analyse and explore the metaphor in note form, in as much detail as possible, listing as many different interpretations of the words and image as they can. This is sometimes called a 'saying a lot, about a little' exercise.

This film will be relevant for teaching English Literature at KS3, KS4 and GCSE in England and Wales. This topic appears in OCR, Edexcel, AQA, WJEC.