More poetry resources from The Horn Book:
Review of the Week: Follow Follow
Five questions for Marilyn Singer
Five new poetry picture books
Natalie Merchant’s poetry-inspired album Leave Your Sleep
Verse narratives booklist

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Poetry can be used to examine and celebrate the world we live in and the worlds we invent. A great way to observe National Poetry Month is to share the following exemplary poetry books for young children featuring the calming rhythms of lullaby, the humorous juxtaposition of portmanteaux, the silliness of made-up holidays, and elegant observations on animal behavior.

Two recent books feature soothing poems that double as lullabies. Lullaby (For a Black Mother), first published by Langston Hughes in 1932, has just the right smooth cadence for a picture book text. Sean Qualls’s superb accompanying collages, showing a mother and child at bedtime, display a dreamlike quality that suggests a transition from wakefulness to sleep. (2–5 years, Harcourt) Leave Your Sleep: A Collection of Classic Children’s Poetry selected by singer Natalie Merchant showcases nineteen of the twenty-six poems that provided lyrics for her 2010 album of the same name. The book works just as well on its own, with Barbara McClintock’s comfortably old-fashioned-looking illustrations offering added humor and details. (2–5 years, Farrar/ Foster)

In J. Patrick Lewis’s World Rat Day: Poems About Real Holidays You’ve Never Heard Of, obscure but entertaining holidays get their own poems, each one funny and playful. Anna Raff’s illustrations feature animals with lots of personality, like the worms who appear worried while a couple of realistically enormous robins dig their bills into the ground overhead. The poems vary in length and style. Children may find themselves inspired to discover (or invent) their own quirky holidays and poems, too. (4–7 years, Candlewick)

Ingenious book design pairs with inventive poetry in Jack Prelutsky’s Stardines Swim High Across the Sky and Other Poems to create this museum-in-a-book of animal verse, featuring an array of unusual critters. The concept itself is simple: combine a real animal with a quality that fits into the name (Bobcat + Sob = Sobcat, “sad / As a feline can be).” Carin Berger’s illustrations incorporate found objects and aged paper to tag and label the various beasts. The total effect is both whimsical and fascinating. (4–7 years, Greenwillow)

Valerie Worth is fondly remembered for her small books of “small poems” — delicate epiphanies springing from thoughts on ordinary things with elegant illustrations by Natalie Babbitt. Pug and Other Animal Poems has a radically different design from those earlier quiet books. Steve Jenkins’s collages of precisely observed creatures in bold tones on contrasting grounds effectively dramatize these eighteen welcome additions to Worth’s oeuvre. Her poems remain a marvel and a joy. (4–7 years, Farrar/Ferguson)

From the April 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Follow Follow:
A Book of Reverso Poems

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A gifted vocalist, Natalie Merchant is a tastemaker whose songs have provided a soundtrack for our times. In 1987 with the band 10,000 Maniacs and their terrific album In My Tribe, she introduced what might be termed Yankee Grunge; everything about it seemed to say Northampton and English Major. Then, in Tigerlily (1995) and Ophelia (1998), Merchant embarked on her solo career and, as these titles suggest, turned to feminism; the album photos of Merchant even seem to present reincarnations of Emily Dickinson. Her next phase came in 2001 with Motherland. Now, after a seven-year hiatus and with a seven-year-old daughter, Merchant has released this work of lullabies and children’s poems.

More Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child’s Garden of Verses) than Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends), Leave Your Sleep is, as Merchant says, full of stories about “witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a janitor’s boy.” If you hear calliope music at this point, you’re not far off; the sounds that fill this album include dulcimers, fiddles, uilleann pipes, concertinas, and penny whistles. In truth, however, the work is a Whitman’s Sampler of styles (Celtic, Klezmer, Cajun, reggae, ragtime, bluegrass) and performers (Lúnasa, the Klezmatics, Wynton Marsalis).

For the most part, the poems here are not au courant, though there are a few twentieth-century selections: E. E. Cummings’s “maggie and milly and molly and may” (where he takes delight in the euphony of those names), Jack Prelutsky’s street chant of flavors in “Bleezer’s Ice-Cream” (which owes a debt to Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”), and Rachel Field’s “Equestrienne” (which recalls William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the poem’s imagistic fascination with “the girl in pink on the milk-white horse”). In the main, however, Merchant’s chosen poems comfortably reside in the nineteenth century, and the accompanying small hardcover book, containing the complete texts of the poems, features author photos of men with handlebar mustaches and women with three names (such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney). Theirs was an era when Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” was considered suitable childhood reading.

While apparently miscellaneous, this collection reveals a specific taste: in the shorthand of reviews, “Christina Rossetti meets Mother Goose.” Here are Gilded Age poems that tell stories (Charles E. Carryl’s “The Sleepy Giant”) and specimens of nonsense (Edward Lear’s “Calico Pie”) as well as five poems by that remarkable writer Anon., who, as Pamela Travers once observed to me, has an amazingly uniform style.

Equally interesting are biographical accounts of the authors that appear in the book. We learn that Robert Louis Stevenson visited a leper colony in Hawaii and decided to give them the piano he was bringing to his Samoan destination, and that Albert Bigelow Paine (“The Dancing Bear”) had a bear-sized crush on Mark Twain. Most interesting is the story about child prodigy Nathalia Crane who, at the age of eleven, published “The Janitor’s Boy” — the poem that inspired Merchant’s best song in the collection:

Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
And the janitor’s boy loves me;
He’s going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

A desert isle with spicy trees
Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;
A right nice place, just fit for two
Where we can live alway.

Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,
He’s busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he’s making a raft
Out of an old settee.

He’ll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.

The day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,
For my parents I hate to annoy:
“I have flown away to an isle in the bay
With the janitor’s red-haired boy.”

Taken altogether, this offering by Natalie Merchant evokes a special mood and vision of parenting. Even as I write this, in early June in Southern California, the air is brisk with the smells of September — and somewhere in rural New England, a mother and her young daughter, in matching OshKosh overalls, stand on a stone or wooden floor, stirring lentil soup while Celtic tunes play in the background.

Leave Your Sleep
by Natalie Merchant
All Ages    Nonesuch Records    4/10
2 CDs (26 songs)     $28.98

Selections from the Album Leave Your Sleep
by Natalie Merchant
All Ages    Nonesuch Records    4/10
1 CD (16 songs)    $18.98

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Reminiscent of Ogden Nash’s, Lawson’s poetry combines deft wordplay with unexpected (often humorous) rhymes and a devotion to showcasing the rhythmic potential of the English language. But as always, Lawson’s signature focus on word sounds takes center stage. With masterful brevity, the majority of the poems stand alone as single quatrain stanzas, however, even the briefest poems contain a mouthful.

Octopus
An octopus spots an illusory obstacle, unfurls a tentacle,
Chops with a Popsicle. Obstinate octopus! Awkward, impractical.
(Popsicle chopping is slow and suboptimal
when the illusion you’re chopping is optical.)

Through surreal imagery and disruption of expectations, Lawson constructs a bizarre world where anything commonplace gets flipped on its head.

Little Red Riding Wolf
The little dog growled,
the dish divorced the spoon,
when Little Red Riding Wolf
howled at the moon.

That dreamlike quality is enhanced by Mexican-Candadian artist Alec Dempster’s 32 full-page paper-cuts. Highly influenced by Mexican graphic art and surrealism, each illustration printed on the antique paper gives this book an overall classic and multicultural feel. It’s beautiful from start to finish.

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The post Ye olde children’s poetry appeared first on The Horn Book.

My teacher read it
To show why we should always
Listen to spiders.
(Charlotte’s Web)

The illustrations
Showed corks growing in bunches
Like fruit on the trees.
(The Story of Ferdinand)

A single gold tooth,
One of them had, but neither
Of them wore a shirt.
(George and Martha)

You know the one where
The police officers
Look like (ahem) pigs?
(Sylvester and the Magic Pebble)

Mother and father
Left him all alone and then
A lion ate him.
(Pierre)

There’s a bird in it
And you’re not supposed to let
Him do anything.
(Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus)

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The McElderry Book

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Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses

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Jennifer Brabander asks The President’s Stuck in the Bathtub author Susan Katz about writing presidential poetry. Read the full review of The President’s Stuck in the Bathtub here.

Jennifer Brabander: Which president was the hardest to write a poem about?

Susan Katz: James Monroe. The incident I used for his poem was the only unusual detail I was able to unearth, even after reading four or five biographies. One historian dubbed him “dull as a stone.” I’d have to concur. (The easiest to write a poem about, I unofficially add, was George W. Bush since he wrote half the poem for me!)

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