“And all shall behold the seasons unfold” in this beautiful volume celebrating nature and verse in its most splendid...
With a keen and sensitive eye, a young English girl explores the Devon countryside.
A scrapbook is the perfect design element for the tale, as Pippa, on a visit to her aunt, shares her favorite pastimes: walking, horseback riding and poetry. Her first-person narration is on notebook paper in cursive writing, while the poetry selections are in old-fashioned Times New Roman. These range from traditional rhymes to a medley of English-language poets writing about cows, lambs and meadow mice, among other topics. Ted Hughes, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Walter de la Mare and John Tams, who wrote the songs for the stage production of War Horse, are among the poets represented. A festive and traditional May Day celebration concludes the day’s activities for Pippa. Gill’s mixed-media artwork features delicately nuanced paintings and sketches of local animals, trees and flowers, allowing readers to see them in close-up detail through Pippa’s eyes, along with the old churches, villages and fields that she slowly passes. Occasional flaps, gatefolds and transparent pages enhance the striking presentation. This is a first collaboration for the former English children’s laureate and his wife; all royalties benefit their charity, Farms for City Children.
“And all shall behold the seasons unfold” in this beautiful volume celebrating nature and verse in its most splendid quietude. (afterword, poetry index) (Poetry/fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6629-3
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Templar/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fresh off his engaging Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys (illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds, 2010) and inspired by the work of Andrew Russ, Raczka continues to dabble in short lyric forms, here experimenting with images conjured up by breaking down a single word. The smaller components that comprise the subsequent free-verse poem read left to right, cascading down the page while maintaining the same horizontal letter positions as in the original word. For example, “vacation” yields “ac tion / i n / a / va n,” alongside Doniger’s spare three-color drawing of a family and a rabbit traveling through the countryside in a van with a canoe on the roof. For readers who find the spatiality of the lettering a challenge for comprehension, Raczka sets the poem in more standard format, “vacation / action / in / a / van,” on the following page. While these 22 poems are uniformly clever, some, like “earthworms”—“a / short / storm / worms / here / worms / there / wear / shoes”—are more successful than others, such as “flowers”—“we slow / for / free / wows”—both in their playfulness and in evoking the suggestive depths of language. Fun as a prompt for poetic exploration but less fulfilling as a stand-alone volume. (Poetry. 8-12)
Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59643-541-4
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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