More clever wordplay from the Prince of Palindromes—not to mention 2006’s Smart Feller / Fart Smeller and Other Spoonerisms—these 34 rhymed riffs on variously challenging tongue twisters will trip up even lingually limber readers. Though incorporating both short phrases (“Knapsack Straps,” “a used yellow yo-yo”) and such longer constructs as “reading rotten written writing really is a pain” and “If you offer moose muesli, / They’ll thank you profusely,” at first glance the brief verses look easy to read aloud—a deceptive impression that the pale, comical, watery-looking cartoon illustrations do nothing to dispel. “Purple-Paper People” depicts the purple-bedraped meeting room of the Purple-Paper People Club, into which an intruder has brought an orange sheet. “I Saw Esau” features a group of children and a seesaw, with diagrammatic lines indicating who saw whom. Agee acknowledges Alvin Schwartz’s A Twister of Twists, A Tangler of Tongues (1972) as a major source, but adds his own distinctive mix of simplicity and sophisticated wit to this top-notch tub full of tangue tonglers. (index) (Picture book/poetry. 7-10)
Pub Date: March 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4231-0315-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
Here’s hoping this will inspire many children to joyfully engage in writing.
Both technique and imaginative impulse can be found in this useful selection of poems about the literary art.
Starting with the essentials of the English language, the letters of “Our Alphabet,” the collection moves through 21 other poems of different types, meters, and rhyme schemes. This anthology has clear classroom applications, but it will also be enjoyed by individual readers who can pore carefully over playful illustrations filled with diverse children, butterflies, flowers, books, and pieces of writing. Tackling various parts of the writing process, from “How To Begin” through “Revision Is” to “Final Edit,” the poems also touch on some reasons for writing, like “Thank You Notes” and “Writing About Reading.” Some of the poems are funny, as in the quirky, four-line “If I Were an Octopus”: “I’d grab eight pencils. / All identical. / I’d fill eight notebooks. / One per tentacle.” An amusing undersea scene dominated by a smiling, orangy octopus fills this double-page spread. Some of the poems are more focused (and less lyrical) than others, such as “Final Edit” with its ending stanzas: “I check once more to guarantee / all is flawless as can be. / Careless errors will discredit / my hard work. / That’s why I edit. / But I don’t like it. / There I said it.” At least the poet tries for a little humor in those final lines.
Here’s hoping this will inspire many children to joyfully engage in writing. (Picture book/poetry. 7-10)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68437-362-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Wordsong/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Updike has revised a set of 12 short poems, one per month, first published in 1965, and Hyman’s busy, finely detailed scenes replace the original edition’s illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. The verses are written in a child’s voice—“The chickadees/Grow plump on seed/That Mother pours/Where they can feed”—and commemorate seasonal weather, flowers, food, and holidays. In the paintings a multiracial, all-ages cast does the same in comfortable, semi-rural New England surroundings, sitting at a table cutting out paper hearts, wading through reeds with a net under a frog’s watchful eye, picnicking, contemplating a leafless tree outside for “November” and a decorated one inside for “December.” The thoughts and language are slightly elevated but not beyond the ken of children, and the pictures enrich the poetry with specific, often amusing, incidents. (Poetry. 6-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8234-1445-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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