Despite its good ideas, this poetic tribute to the great rain forest falls flat. The poems tend to be clunky—unrhymed but also lacking rhythm and structure—and are hard to read aloud, a mortal sin for poetry. “The Girls,” a poem that refers to zebra swallowtail butterflies, sounds patronizing: “Lazy morning, no agenda, / hanging with the sisters, / showing off their jewels, / sipping water ladylike / through a straw.” Other poems simply lack imagination: “There is no word big enough / to hold rain forest rain.” That said, the poetry is actually better than the pictures: The design of the volume incorporates what look like Polaroid shots as well as full-page, full-bleed photographs. The latter are more successful, but the photos of water, sky and wildlife rarely seem specific to the Amazon; they could be almost anywhere and are usually somewhat out of focus or too limited to capture the poem’s message. Some of the poems are printed on reproductions of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook; slapped onto a photographic page that sometimes also holds a snapshot, it’s supposed to look like a scrapbook but instead it just hides whatever is behind it. (Poetry. 8-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59078-442-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Wordsong/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512373-5
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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