An energetic cast of characters in 20 short, freely styled poems in both English and Spanish help readers "see everything for the first time." "My Grandma's Songs" "would follow/the beat of/the washing machine" and "could turn/my grandma/into a young girl." The laughing tomatoes turn their "wireframed/bushes/into/Christmas trees/in spring," shown in a spread in which wedged into the smiling mouths of children and pets are, somewhat astonishingly, slices of heavily seeded tomato. With vibrantly stylized illustrations, this lively gathering carries an invitation from Alarcón to "make these poems yours" by reading them, words followed by the final short poem—"there are no endings/just new beginnings." An accessible, open-hearted collection.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 978-0-89239-139-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Children's Book Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
Definitely on a roll, Stevenson has reinvented himself as a poet, following up Sweet Corn (1995) and Popcorn (1998) with this new set of small, seemingly artless, instantly engaging free verse, printed in a variety of shapes and colors. It’s a mix of appreciative observations of the everyday—bird song, hats, the many things passersby carry—with imaginative flights, from the thought that a drawbridge structure makes “a swell hotel for trolls,” to the claim that dumpsters rock-and-roll on Halloween; every one of the accompanying freely drawn watercolors captures to perfection the essence of its subject, whether it be a peanut, a shabby old building, dogwood in spring, or a spectacularly complicated road-paving machine. This is another gem from an astonishingly versatile veteran, and readers following the series will rightly speculate on the next collection’s title: Feed Corn? Unicorn? (Poetry. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-15837-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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