Gentle Journeys in Poetry for Younger Children
by Frank Lipsius
Kids gravitate to poetry only when they grow older and, for the fleeting period of adolescent rebellion, latch onto rap, which projects muscularity by being spouted by gangstas whose real guns and tough posturing avoid poetry’s normally gentle image.
The gentle image is still retained, as if to give the gangstas something to rebel against, by the anthologies of poems for younger kids with clever themes, adorable illustrations and enjoyable poems.
American Poetry (Sterling, $14.95), in the Poetry for Young People series, edited by John Hollander and illustrated with Sally Wern Comport’s Grandma-Moses-like drawings, thoughtfully introduces poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.
Once Upon a Poem: Favorite Poems That Tell Stories (Scholastic, $18.95) includes “The Night Before Christmas,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” among 15 poems by the likes of W.H. Auden, Roald Dahl, and C.S. Lewis.
Lee Bennett Hopkins’ Days to Celebrate (Greenwillow, $17.99) goes through the calendar with poems for every month and monthly calendars noting poetry-related anniversaries.
Individual Poets
Walt Whitman, the bard of Camden, is celebrated in a biography emphasizing his witness to the Civil War in Walt Whitman: Words for America (Scholastic, $16.95) by Barbara Kerley, with beautifully illustrations by Brian Selznick.
Loren Long turns Whitman’s poem, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (Simon & Schuster, $16.95), into a lushly illustrated book viewing our contemporary world from a boy’s wide-eyed perspective.
A timely reminder of the humorous nonsense of Edward Lear is fashionably packaged in Valorie Fisher’s Nonsense! (Atheneum, $16.95), while the lesser-known turn-of-the-last-century poet Charles Edward Carryl is handsomely recalled in The Camel’s Lament (Random House, $16.95), a picture book Charles Santore illustrated with lots of animals in amusing settings for the lament of the hard working, under-appreciated camel.
Leonard Jenkins’s bold illustrations capture the gritty story Robert Burleigh tells in Langston’s Train Ride (HarperCollins, $16.95), about Langston Hughes’s train ride that inspired his first well-known poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which is also included in the book.
Today’s Poetry
Contemporary poetry falls into two categories: poems aimed at amusing and educating kids and poetry to inspire young poets.
Susan Katz shows the lively possibilities of the first category in A Revolutionary Field Trip: Poems of Colonial America (Simon & Schuster, $16.95), which, as the sub-title indicates, takes to the streets of Philadelphia (the author lives in Phoenixville). Its cobblestones, the author says, “ought to be called wobblestones.” The informative and lively poems about a field trip include the recipe for Colonial-era ink (vinegar, berry juice and salt) and a map of the Indian tribes’ territories before the colonists arrived, among R.W. Alley’s expressive and amusing drawings.
Vadim Levin’s Silly Horse (Pumpkin House, $15.95) is translated from Russian, but it seems to delight in the rhymes and oddities of English. That might be because the author wrote them as though translated from English, so coming back again, his poems have the air of whimsy built around rhymes with dreamy fantasy illustrations by Evgeny Antonenkov.
Kate Hovey’s Voices of the Trojan War (Simon & Schuster, $17.95) takes on the events and personalities of the long, tragic Greek war with short poems evoking the gods in ancient Greece. Leonid Gore’s charcoal drawings convey the strength and image of ancient warriors.
Marilyn Singer’s Central Heating: Poems About Fire and Warmth (Knopf, $15.95), printed in red and illustrated in various amusing styles by Meilo So, varies in theme from holidays and forges to chili peppers and the center of the earth to show the heat in things that burn or heat up.
Eileen Spinelli’s Feathers: Poems About Birds (Henry Holt, $16.95) makes birds seem distinct and curious in rhymes adecorated with realistic drawings by Lisa McCue.
These might not be subjects for the gangstas; so they are all the more indicative of the variety and depth still being celebrated in poetry.
Frank Lipsius is a contributing writer to MetroKids.