The Monster Trap

Designed as an introduction to poetry for early readers, the Monster Trap follows a stray boy into a cave where he meets a monster who captures him. Bargaining for his life, the boy promises to lead the monster to a town where there will be hundreds of children the monster can eat instead of him... Consisting four consecutive poems, each arranged with four stanzas of four lines, the reader will note that all sixty four lines of this ensemble has eight beats in every line and all the lines are paired in rhyme. Initially written by a language teacher hoping to show his pupils how poets work within the constraints of structure, the story is aimed at inspiring the creative use of vocabulary to achieve literary objectives.