Stately figures and scenes in luminous colors provide rich backdrops for 74 English poems selected as much for their sonorous language as for their familiarity. Morris arranges her choices in, by and large, organic order, opening with Kathleen Raines’ mesmerizing “Spell of Creation,” closing with Tennyson’s “Poet’s Song,” and in between, letting Blake, Shakespeare and Byron, Poe and Elizabeth Barrett Browning rub shoulders with the likes of Eleanor Farjeon and Walter de la Mare, Auden and Yeats with Ogden Nash and Rachel Field. Aside from a startlingly bloodthirsty ballad by Thomas Love Peacock, the entries are eloquent observations that range in tone from reverent to droll, on growing, loving, seeing beneath surfaces and living in the world. Animals put in appearances too, from Blake’s Tyger to Milne’s “Furry Bear.” Extending even to the endpapers, the flood of words and images in this sumptuous volume creates an uplifting experience for the eye and ear both. An ideal collection to give or to share. (indexes) (Poetry. 10-12, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-905236-56-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Barefoot Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
This oversized companion to the much ballyhooed My Very First Mother Goose (1996) will take toddlers and ex-toddlers deeper into the playscapes of the language, to meet Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard, and Dusty Bill From Vinegar Hill; to caper about the mulberry bush, polka with My Aunt Jane, and dance by the light of the moon. Mixing occasional humans into her furred and feathered cast, Wells creates a series of visual scenarios featuring anywhere from one big figure, often dirty or mussed, to every single cat on the road to St. Ives (over a thousand). Opie cuts longer rhymes down to two or three verses, and essays a sly bit of social commentary by switching the answers to what little girls and boys are made of. Though Wells drops the ball with this last, legitimizing the boys’ presence in a kitchen by dressing them as chefs, in general the book is plainly the work of a match made in heaven, and merits as much popularity as its predecessor. (Folklore. 1-6)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7636-0683-9
Page Count: 107
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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