Mind
you, the poems aren’t fall-themed—but each of these books is worth curling up
with on a gray day or even one of those blue-sky days blazing with leaves. Don’t forget the apple cider!
Outside
Your Window: A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Mark
Hearld (February 2012)
This
book is a case of that old expression: the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts. Though Outside Your Window is a collection of poems, it is also an
introduction to nature. Many of the lines sound like a very pleasant
science teacher explaining things such as birds, cows, and seasons. I was often
reminded of prose poetry or simply well-stated prose. But then, some of the
poems—and certainly some lines, are startlingly poetic. They are
rendered all the more so by the poetry of Hearld’s illustrations, which wrap
around Davies’ work like a quilt sewn by Mother Nature.
Be sure to take off the dust jacket. The look and design of the bare
cover are wonderful in their own right. Hearld’s artwork manages to combine a
look of 1950s children’s book illustration (e.g., Feodor Rojankovsky’s
Caldecott winner, Frog Went A-Courtin’) with nonfiction nature illustration.
The textured grandeur of his mixed-media style is made all the more
intriguing by its often-small subjects. For example, a poem called “Night” is
illustrated by a full spread that begins with yellow stalks of barley on the
left, outlined by blues in a printerly way. A brown-and-blue mouse eating
fallen grains of barley at the bottom of the page leads us across the
gutter into a dark blue night holding the white-lettered poem. A moon, a star,
and an owl overlook the right-hand page. What this description
leaves out is that the whole thing sweeps and swirls as if brushed by a night
wind. Hearld’s artwork makes the book into something positively
spellbinding—and yet the poems are ultimately science-minded. The book
is a strange and wonderful piece of art, poems and all.
I
have questioned the poetic qualities of Davies’ work. We get, for example,
lines such as these:
The
frogs are croaking in the pond
and
laying eggs like spotted jelly.
Next
week the spots will be wiggly tadpoles.
Next
month they’ll grow a pair of legs.
By
summer they’ll be tiny frogs that leap off into the world.
And
one night in another spring, when they’re big frogs, they’ll be back!
This
particular poem’s best lines frame the ones I just gave you with frog calls: “Rrrruurrrp.
Rrrrrruuurp. Rrrrrruuup.”
However,
I should note that such descriptions take on a greater meaning because of Davies’s
sharp eye for the details of nature. I had no idea that “Lambs’ tails wiggle
when they’re happy…You’ll see it happen when a lamb is feeding….” Or that
after dandelions bloom, “they fold up like furled umbrellas pointing at the
sky./Then each rolled umbrella opens/into a puff of down.” The description of a
gull’s flight is particularly fine. First the gull “runs into the wind, wings
working hard for takeoff.” Then it “scoops the air with big, long strokes….”
After soaring, the gull glides: “Now it bends [its wings] to make a W/and
slides down the wind toward the sea.” Each of the four small stanzas is
introduced with a flight sound or verb in a larger font.
Davies
often uses repetition, cumulative refrains, and other devices to give her poems
a more song-like quality. Her poem “Cherry Blossoms” ends each stanza with “blossoms”—the
word is used once in the first stanza, twice in the second, and three times at
the last. It’s a simple but true way to describe the drifts of pink that increasingly cover the
ground.
I
would have liked to see more metaphors, but when they appear they’re very good.
“Plant [seeds] in some soil,/crumbly and moist as cake mix,” for instance. At
the end of a poem called “Honey” that describes the work and sound of bees
bringing nectar, we are told that their buzz and hum is “The sound of sweetness
and the smell of flowers,/of sunny, sleepy summer—/the sound of honey.” That
last line is just perfect.
Davies
has another stupendous stanza at the end of “Tide,” but I’ll share the one at
the end of “Night,” whose illustration I talked about above. Davies describes a
night with its breeze, an owl, a star, a “moon [sailing] white and silver/in
the dark sky.” Having led us into the night, she closes with:
Sometimes
you can feel,
sometimes
you can feel,
sometimes
you can feel the world is turning.
So
yes, at first I felt that many of the poems were a bit bland. But then I began to
see this book in a different light. It really does give us eyes for looking at the
world of nature that lies outside the window. And while its voice is often
simple, it flashes powerful language every so often like streaks of lightning.
Here’s another one, where Davies extends a cliché and makes it new. Speaking of
a horse, she says:
…its
dark eye is quiet,
and
its nose is velvet,
softer
than your own cheek.
I
should mention that Davies gives us moments of humor, as in her poem “Five
Reasons to Keep Chickens.” She also gives advice, mostly of the kind that will
help children better care for the world. Sometimes it’s just nice; for instance,
she tells us we should say thank you to worms. The book ends with instructions about
how to save seeds and how to make winter cakes for birds.
Outside
Your Window grew on me like a seed sprouting up into a plant. It’s a hodgepodge,
yes, but in the best possible way—like compost (and there is a poem about
compost). Even when Davies is just chatting about nature in that kindly
teacher’s voice, there is something soothing and enlightening about her words.
Other times she really sings, and Hearld sings with her. I recommend this book
wholeheartedly.
National
Geographic Book of Animal Poetry: 200 Poems with Photographs that Squeak, Soar,
and Roar! edited by J. Patrick Lewis (September 2012)
Like
Davies’ book, this one is chockfull of poems—a poetical bang for one’s buck,
which I like very much. There have been a lot of books of animal poems over the
years (e.g., Eric Carle’s collection, Animals Animals), but some genius finally
came up with the idea of pairing photos from National Geographic’s vast
collection with an anthology of poems, in this case one created by our current
US Children’s Poet Laureate. Huzzah!
While
many of the poems are from the past, by poets such as Emily Dickinson, Robert
Frost, and Ogden Nash, more recent and current poets are also well represented.
The poems are grouped in nicely parallel sections. After a brief set of
introductory poems called “Welcome to the World,” sections proceed as follows: “The
Big Ones,” “The Little Ones,” “The Winged Ones,” “The Water Ones,” “The Strange
Ones,” “The Noisy Ones,” and “The Quiet Ones.” A section of four poems called
“Final Thought” concludes the book. The fact that there are sections about
noisy and quiet animals endeared the book to me even while I was still in the table
of contents.
But
really, how do we judge a collection like this? Probably by looking at the
overall qualities of the poems and the ways in which they represent their
subjects. Variety of styles, voices, and ideas is important. Another
consideration is the fit between illustrations and text. These big picture
criteria are difficult to wrangle on a poem-by-poem basis, which leads me to
take the old-fashioned approach: going with my gut. So yes, this is a terrific
collection! But I will provide you with some examples to back that up. As is required
so often in life, let’s begin with the elephant.
The
book offers four poems about elephants on a left-hand page with a really great
photo of an elephant on the right—the photo, labeled “Asian elephant” in very
tiny letters at the lower left, shows an elephant in a pond with green hills
behind, tossing water onto his head with his trunk. The most well-known and
oft-anthologized poem on the spread is “Eletelephony” by Laura E. Richards (“Once
there was an elephant/Who tried to use the telephant—/No! No! I mean an
elephone/Who tried to use the telephone…”). The other three poems are brief: an
anonymous quatrain that has probably been around awhile comments
on the “great big trunk” that “has no lock and has no key,” but is carried
everywhere by the animal, along with two more modern poems, another quatrain and a haiku. These are the latter two:
Elephant
A
threatening cloud, plumped fat and gray,
Snorts
a thunder, rains a spray
And
billows puffs of dust away—
A
weather maker every day.
—Ann
Whitford Paul
Anthology
So
many stories
Locked
inside the amber eye
Of
one elephant
—Tracie
Vaughn Zimmer
Of
course, not every animal gets more than one poem. The variety of poems—and
animals—is just right, however. I’ll list two subjects from each section to give you an
idea: cow and orangutan, ladybug and lizard, bat and hummingbird, starfish and
walrus, armadillo and blue-footed booby, pig and raccoon, Luna moth and sloth.
As you can tell by the elephant examples, some of the poems are silly and
others are serious. Here are excerpts from two other poems, one of each type:
from
“Moray Eel”
Nighttime’s
my bright time.
It’s
head-out-and-bite time.
Give-shellfish-a-fright
time.
Swim-quick-as-a-kite
time.
Stay-out-of-my-sight
time.
Or
fins-up-and-fight time.
When
I am the blight of the sea.
—Steven
Withrow
from
“Dog”
The
sky is the belly of a large dog,
sleeping.
All
day the small gray flag of his ear
is
lowered and raised.
The
dream he dreams has no beginning.
Here
on earth we dream
a
deep-eyed dog sleeps under our stairs
and
will rise to meet us.
Dogs
curl in dark places,
nests
of rich leaves.
—
Naomi Shihab Nye
The photo that accompanies the moray eel poem is a head-on shot of
an orange-faced eel with teeth glaring and yellow eyes bulging off to the
sides. The dog photo is a bright green field of grass with a small dog’s head
sticking up out of it, mouth open in a grin and ears jutting like a
bat’s.
The best poem in the book is arguably Lewis's own, a poem so comprehensive and gorgeous that it rightfully introduces the collection. Only you might miss it if you're not careful: it's printed on the front cover beneath the dust jacket. The poem is titled "Instructions Found After the Flood," and I'll give you just the first seven lines (of 19).
Let the red fox quicken the seasons.
Let the zebra buck and clatter in the cage of his skin.
Leave the glass lagoons to the blue heron, whose eye is steady.
Let jungles whisper jaguar, whose paw is velvet.
Let the worm explore the globe, his apple.
Let the spider embroider the air.
Let tongue and belly be called reptile.
You see what I mean? This poem, like the collection, is deeply satisfying. Not
every anthology is as rich as National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry, but every public and school library
and, I hope, personal library needs this book.
