Could have been wonderful; isn’t.
Collage illustrations and sidebars accompany 25 of Frost’s most accessible poems.
Organized in three groups, the selections reflect Frost’s keenly observed walkabouts and rueful interrogations of youth and age. A convivial series introduction invites readers’ enjoyment: “There is NO wrong way to experience a poem.” Each sidebar contains three sections. “Engage” poses questions to help readers ponder poetic form and themes. “Imagine” suggests an activity for creative expression, and “Define” explains potentially unfamiliar words (bolded in each poem). The collaged mashups, composed of stock and public domain images, affix birds, flowers, and figures onto rich-hued but often banal landscapes that alternately evoke 19th-century European paintings and retrograde greeting cards. In all but one image, people appear to be light-skinned. Even where Frost specifically names species or describes scenes, generic, often misleading pastiches predominate—a sorely missed opportunity to extend and add visual nuance to the poems. “Hyla Brook” describes a dry June waterway “gone groping underground” with the Hyla frogs—a “brook to none but who remember long.” An image of a frothing, blue-and-white stream contradicts the poem’s subtle meaning. Notwithstanding the editorial openhandedness, an appended commentary provides didactic synopses and final suggestions for understanding each poem. A popular misconception of “The Road Not Taken” is thankfully corrected here, but for “Birches,” Frost’s meticulous imagery of a boy, a “swinger of birches,” is interpreted as “children on swings” in a complete misreading of the poem.
Could have been wonderful; isn’t. (biographical facts, bibliography) (Poetry. 8-11)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63819-106-3
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Bushel & Peck Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A powerful, lyrical tribute to the musician whose music is so much a part of our lives.
This moving biography honors the life and work of the legendary folk singer who celebrated the lives of working people all over the US.
Guthrie, born in Oklahoma in 1912, came from a poor family filled with music, but devastated by death and illness. As a youngster, he absorbed the sounds of country living and the traditional music of Oklahoma and Texas. Later, during the Great Depression, he used these memories to become a popular voice for the dust bowl refugees, writing and singing about them and performing on radio in Los Angeles. He spent years moving from place to place in support of the union movement, migrant field workers, and coal miners. Christensen (Moon Over Tennessee, 1999, etc.) writes briefly of his marriages, his children, and his eventual tragic death from Huntington’s disease, but the thrust is his devotion to the cause of downtrodden workers. The words of his signature song “This Land is Your Land” run along the top of each page and are printed in their entirety at the end along with a timeline and Web site citation. (No bibliography or source notes are included.) Christensen’s text is strong and beautiful, as rich in images as her subject’s music. Through them, the reader will get a wonderful sense of the soul of her subject and his times. Read aloud, this could work for younger readers, but the dramatic mixed media, woodcut-like illustrations in a picture-book format will attract older ones as well.
A powerful, lyrical tribute to the musician whose music is so much a part of our lives. ((Biography. 8-10))Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-81113-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
A poor performance, “[s]ans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” (introduction, indexes) (Poetry. 8-11, adult)
Like the old man’s hose, Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech is “a world too wide” to be well-served by this paltry selection of 21 poems, three per “age.”
Hopkins tries to inject some color into the mix with Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee?” and Lewis Carroll’s “You are old, father William.” Unfortunately, these, combined with passages from the speech itself, only make his other choices look anemic. To the “infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” for instance, Rebecca Kai Dotlich offers a bland “Amazing, your face. / Amazing”; on the facing page, a “traditional Nigerian lullaby” is stripped of music: “Sleep my baby near to me. / Lu lu lu lu lu lu.” Along with Joan Bransfield Graham’s “A Soldier’s Letter to a Newborn Daughter,” which ends with a condescending “I’m coming home / to my girls… / With All My Love, / DAD,” most of the rest are cast in prosaic free verse. Hopkins’ “Curtain,” probably written for this collection, closes the set with theatrical imagery. Billout supplies pale, distant views of small figures and some surreal elements in largely empty settings—appropriate, considering the poetry, but they lack either appeal for young audiences or any evocation of the Shakespearean lines’ vigorous language and snarky tone.
A poor performance, “[s]ans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” (introduction, indexes) (Poetry. 8-11, adult)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-56846-218-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Creative Editions/Creative Company
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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