“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, / Columbus did not have a clue.” In deft, light verse, Shields (Food Fight, p. 963, etc.) revisits dozens of high and low spots in this country’s history, to which political cartoonist Thompson appends plenty of fine-lined, tongue-in-cheek caricatures and vignettes. The tone is generally, but not always, jocular; between noting that the continent’s earliest inhabitants “hissed and growled and roared great roars— / the first Americans were dinosaurs,” and a soaring tribute to the Statue of Liberty, who “saw the towers’ awful fall” but still “holds her torch up high,” the poet treats readers to a cavalcade of wars, inventions, and firsts. There’s also a three-part “Parade of Presidents,” and accounts of selected watershed events—most memorably the Montgomery bus boycott, sung to a certain familiar tune: “The driver on the bus said, ‘Move on back! / Move on back! Move on back! / White folk in front and black in the back. / All through the town!’” Though the skimpy (and not always accurate: the Emancipation Proclamation did not free “all slaves”) running header timeline s a dispensable feature, on the whole this will make an indispensable, refreshing break from tests and textbooks. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
