BUG OFF!

Mother and son collaborate once more (Birds of a Feather, 2011, etc.), creating a group of poems and photographs that celebrate some well-known creepy crawlies. 

Fly, praying mantis, butterfly, ants, honey bee, lovebug, daddy longlegs, spider, dragonfly, tick, ladybug and grasshopper each take a spread, the photo opposite a page of text that includes the poem and a paragraph of facts. Most of Yolen’s poems rhyme, and an author’s note encourages readers to create their own poems, with a caution that they choose their words wisely, using the lightning-versus–lightning bug quote from Mark Twain to support this. But some nature-minded readers may see Yolen as not taking her own advice. There is sometimes a disconnect between the beauty of the photographs and the more joking tone and anthropomorphizing of some of the poems. A spider’s tired joke about the World Wide Web is a stark contrast to these lovely lines, for instance: “A flittering cloud, / a crowd / of creeps. / And then, as if / an unseen broom / sweeps / skimmingly / across the sky, / the swarm is gone / in a blink / of an eye.” Stemple’s photographs are the true stars of this book. His macro views show such details as the rainbow colorations on a fly’s wings, the serrations on a grasshopper’s rear legs and the many units that make up the lovebug’s compound eyes.

A bug-themed companion to their previous collaborations.