Mother Goose in Flight

At least two new Mother Goose books hit the market this year, both of them bringing a fresh take on what you might have thought was a worn-out corner of children's book real estate. The Green Mother Goose: Saving the World One Rhyme at a Time by David Davis and Jan Peck, with illustrations by Carin Berger, goes environmental on the good old goose's tail feathers, while Nursery Rhyme Comics is a compilation illustrated by "50 Celebrated Cartoonists."


The Green Mother Goose by David Davis and Jan Peck, illustrations by Carin Berger

The Green Mother Goose authors replace every well-known rhyme in their anthology with an environmentally oriented version. Here are a few examples.

We read of Old Mother Hubbard:

She markets today
With cloth shopping bags,
And when she gets home
Her dog is all wags!

Little Jack Horner has lost his interest in plums:

Little Jack Horner
Changed bulbs in the corner,
Replacing the old incandescents.
Now the lamps on the sills
Cut his mama's high bills,
'Cause the lights are
all compact fluorescent.

Meet Mary, now two different girls:

Mary, Mary quite contrary,
Refused to garden green.
Her toxic sprays, a choking haze,
Spreading dangers, hurtful and mean.

Organic Mary, not contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With ladybug smiles and compost piles,
And pretty herbs all in a row.

The collage illustrations are as fresh as organic vegetables, remarkably well suited to this collection of poems. Visit Berger's website for a look at more of her work.

As you can see from the examples, the rhymes are a little uneven. And if you are not up for didacticism, don't bother. The book, which came out in time for Earth Day 2011, is laden with overt messages about environmentalism. If you're an elementary school teacher or parent trying to teach your kids how to save the planet, you might want to add The Green Mother Goose to your repertoire. If, however, you're a big fan of the originals and don't want your nursery rhymes diluted with such a tightly focused message, you might want to give this book a pass.


Nursery Rhyme Comics, illustrated by 50 artists, with an introduction by Leonard S. Marcus

Like The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, which I reviewed last week, this collection strikes me as being just as much for adults as for children, if not more so.

It's a great premise, actually—sign up a posse of renowned comic book illustrators to reinterpret the Mother Goose rhymes. Throw in an intro by children's literature expert Leonard Marcus while you're at it, and you've got a veritable collectors' item.

And you do, truly. But is it a book for what we consider today to be the primary audience for these rhymes, 3- to 5-year-olds? Perhaps not. The small panels and sometimes less-than-cute characterizations would seem to give this book more appeal for the 6-to-8 crowd, frankly. Oh, and for a whole bunch of adults. Yeah, I suspect it's mostly for them!

That said, this is a very cool book. One advantage of getting these illustrators on board, most of them outsiders when it comes to children's literature, is that they bring a fresh eye to material that may be have been overdone by insiders. Not that their takes on the rhymes all work from where I'm standing. But it's a lot of fun to see what the newcomers have done with these iconic rhymes.

For example, when Patrick McDonnell's "donkey, old and gray," begins to "blow [his] horn," he whips out a saxophone, startling a sleeping bird on a branch. Stephanie Yue's "Hickory, Dickory, Dock" mouse turns out to be a medieval-looking critter who runs clear up a clock tower to strike the clock himself. He then descends by using his red kerchief as a parachute. James Sturm's nimble Jack follows the new trend for breaking the fourth wall, addressing his audience angrily in response to the rhyme's apparent directive, "Jack jump over the candlestick.": "What?! You must think I'm pretty stupid! Why don't you jump over a candlestick! Like I would do such a thing." He goes off, muttering, "You're crazy! Putting ideas like that in a kid's head. I'm going home." Then there's a nice twist at the end.

Much of the artwork is stunning. "If All the Seas Were One Sea" has tended to be illustrated rather insipidly in past compilations, but here we get a color-drenched cartoon hemisphere bearing a gigantic lumberjack who wields his axe to fell the world's biggest tree. (The axe and the stars alike have voice bubbles blithely announcing, "Twinkle!" or "Sparkle!")

As you might expect from the comic book crowd, most of these illustrators take full advantage of the storytelling possibilities the rhymes present. Eleanor Davis gives us the tale of "The Queen of Tarts" on a spread with 12 panels that are tied together by their placement in the framework of a large castle and its grounds. Richard Thompson's "There Was an Old Woman Tossed Up in a Basket" adds a young assistant and a device called an Old Lady Launcher. (I'll bet Acme holds the patent.)

This collection is marvelous; just don't expect it to appeal to the very youngest lap readers. For them, we should take a look at some standout versions over the years.

No, wait—first let's visit the Opies. In case you don't know, Iona and Peter Opie were a husband-and-wife team of British folklorists who studied nursery rhymes and other children's literature. (Peter has passed away, but I believe Iona is still alive, though retired.) Their compilations are considered to be scholarly; some are kid friendly, too. The Opie Book of Nursery Rhymes, illustrated by Pauline Baynes (who also illustrated the Narnia series), seems to be designed for 7- to 9-year-olds, perhaps as a classroom read-aloud, but Tail Feathers from Mother Goose: The Opie Rhyme Book is another story, with its gorgeously fun artwork by a number of well-known (mostly British) illustrators. They include Shirley Hughes, Jan Ormerod, Chris Riddell, Colin McNaughton, Angela Barrett, John Birmingham, Marc Brown, Errol Le Cain, Helen Oxenbury, and Quentin Blake, among others. The book is perfect for lap readers and has the intriguing advantage of deliberately focusing on less familiar rhymes. (It was published as a fundraiser for the Opies' large collection of early children's literature, which was donated to Oxford University's Bodleian Library.) See Maurice Sendak's cover illustration, shown above right.

If you're interested in the history of nursery rhymes, try The Annotated Mother Goose, with notes by William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould. Baring-Gould is best known as a Sherlock Holmes scholar, but he and his wife published this Mother Goose volume together, and it's just fascinating. (I first ran across it at my grandmother's house. Later I tracked down a copy for myself.) For instance, did you know that Edward Lear attributed his limerick career to a nursery rhyme that's a limerick?

There was an old woman of Norwich,
Who lived upon nothing but porridge;
Parading the town,
She turned cloak into gown,
The thrifty old woman of Norwich.

Then there's the April Fool's tradition. The annotators tell us that it used to be people only played jokes until noon on April Fool's Day. Those who tried it in the afternoon could be told:

April-fool time's past and gone,
You're the fool, and I am none.

You may have heard that some of the rhymes have political meanings, but it turns out "Humpty Dumpty" is not one of them. Instead it is a riddle that may be thousands of years old.

The book divides the rhymes into groups like "Lullabies and Game Songs," "Charms, Auguries, and Nature Lore," and my favorite, ""Some That Came Later That Might Have Come Before." The volume includes many rhymes you probably haven't heard—here's one of the charms, intended to help a bewitched cow give up its milk:

Cushy cow, bonny, let down thy milk,
And I will give thee a gown of silk;
A gown of silk and a silver tee,
If thou wilt let down thy milk to me.

But what about Mother Goose for toddlers, you may ask? Of course, you have a lot of options. The Real Mother Goose, with illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright, was first published by Rand McNally in 1916 and has been in print ever since. It's currently available as a Dover edition. (I just discovered I acquired it in its 75th printing, in 1983!) The old-fashioned illustrations seem to fit these traditional rhymes, and there's the comfort factor, as well, since many of us grew up with this edition.

My own favorite version resulted from the happy pairing of the highly esteemed Iona Opie and the greatly esteemed Rosemary Wells, who together created My Very First Mother Goose and Here Comes Mother Goose. The books feature Wells' signature bunnies and kitties and the rhymes are set in a nice big font. The artwork itself is large and simple, yet active and engaging. In short, these are the perfect books for toddlers and kindergartners. I am especially fond of the use of pure, simple colors and textured elements.

By the way, you may have heard that a Boston woman named Elizabeth (or Mary) Goose was the origin of the Mother Goose figure, but the tradition actually goes back farther than that, and into different countries. According to the great Iona Opie, this story is simply that—another story associated with the rhymes.

A few other Mother Goose editions are worth mentioning: Mary Engelbreit's, which I find stiff and decorative, though the strong colors are a plus; Gyo Fujikawa's, which is delightful, sweet without being saccharine; Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever, which has the best "Jack Be Nimble" ever, among other great renditions; and Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, illustrated by Scott Gustafson, which has a classic feel, lovely and placid.

An actual classic would be Kate Greenaway's 1881 edition. Yep, it's still in print. See art above right (presumably Miss Muffet).

Or look for the Jesse Willcox Smith edition from 1914, which is available to this day, as well. Her illustrations sometimes cross the line from sweet to saccharine, but they're very pretty nonetheless.

Jumping back to the present, I will just mention two additional variations on the Mother Goose tradition. In 2009, boy book expert and children's book author Jon Scieszka came out with Truckery Rhymes, in which the characters in the Mother Goose tradition all become trucks and cars. This book is associated with the Trucktown series, illustrated by David Shannon, Loren Long, and David Gordon. See my review here. Suffice it to say, little boys will probably get a kick out of this one. (I remember back in the days when my younger brother was one or two—he used to pound my dad's shoulder when we were out driving, pointing at every truck or car in sight and shrieking "Beece! Beece!" Which meant "bus," of course.)

Of course, in the case of any parody variation, it's a good idea to read the original rhymes with your children or students first. Then they'll be in on the joke.

One interesting recent offering is Mother Goose: Numbers on the Loose by Leo and Diane Dillon. This famed husband-and-wife pair of artists anthologized nursery rhymes with numbers in them, illustrating them beautifully, as always.

Then there are the books I want to get my hands on: Salley Mavor's fabric relief variation, Pocketful of Posies; Kady MacDonald Denton's A Child's Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Have you seen her illustrations for Bonny Becker's A Visitor for Bear?); and Sylvia Long's Mother Goose (Her illustrations for Dianna Hutts Aston's books An Egg Is Quiet, A Seed Is Sleepy, and A Butterfly Is Patient are really something.).

But if you can only get one Mother Goose book for an actual child who's three or four, stick with My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells or Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever. The facial expressions of the characters alone are worth the price of admission!


Note: I requested a copy of Nursery Rhyme Comics from the Amazon Vine program.

Update: I found James Marshall's Mother Goose at the library today, as well as a third (smaller) Opie-Wells collection of more obscure rhymes, Mother Goose's Little Treasures.

A Handful of Poems: Five Anthologies for Small Children

I was reading The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children, edited by Philip Hawthorn (Usborne, 2004), when I came up with the Wynken, Blynken, and Nod rule, which states that any poetry collection for little kids that includes Eugene Fields’s sappy poem, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” should be red-flagged as being behind the times. I solemnly swear that I came up with the rule before the British Corollary occurred to me. It states that any book of poems for small children which includes “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” is likely to be British.

Sure enough, the only other book of the five I’m reviewing that includes WBN is My First Oxford Book of Poems, edited by John Foster (Oxford UP, 2000). Now, random as my rule may seem, it hints at other facets of children’s poetry collections published by the Brits. In general, I found the poems to be more sophisticated. Whether this means that UK editors consider young children to be capable of listening to longer, more complex poems than American editors do or simply indicates that they had a wider age range in mind, I do not know. But I do know that the two British collections include more classic, literary poems than the other three collections. The books somehow seems more stately to me than the American ones, if a little old-fashioned. They also have the advantage of drawing on poets not always added to American collections, e.g., John Agard and Roger McGough. This may be more of a sideways shift than a measure of fuller breadth, but it is still refreshing.

Heavy hitters like William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Shakespeare are represented in Philip Hawthorn's Usborne anthology, but so are Spike Milligan, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Roald Dahl, and the famous Anon. (Did you know that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that verse about the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead? I didn’t!) I particularly enjoyed the poems I hadn’t read elsewhere, such as the first in the collection, “Magic Cat,” by Peter Dixon. The poem tells of a family cat who accidentally becomes magic and then turns the human family members into various things with her wand of a tail. Roger McGough has three poems in the collection. My favorite is “The Sound Collector,” in which an ominous figure carries away all of the household sounds in a bag. “He didn’t leave his name/Left us only silence....”

Cathy Shimmen’s illustrations suit Hawthorn’s book, light and bright without being saccharine. They don’t overpower the poems, but they do round out the pages nicely. The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children skews a little old for toddlers, but it’s a solid collection for four- to eight-year-olds.

One thing I like about John Foster’s collection, My First Oxford Book of Poems, is that he organizes the poems into categories: Out and About, Creatures, From Dusk till Dawn, Beside the Sea, Fantastical and Nonsensical, and Weather and Seasons. A children’s poetry collection can feel like such a jumble without an organizational strategy, and besides, I like being able to read one section each night before bed.

I can almost forgive Foster for his inclusion of the overly adorable WBN because he also includes Nancy Willard’s marvelous, mysterious bedtime poem, “Magic Story for Falling Asleep,” which begins: “When the last giant came out of his cave/and his bones turned into the mountain/and his clothes turned into the flowers/nothing was left but his tooth....” Foster ranges a little farther afield with his choices than Hawthorn does, pulling in some poets who are less well known and are more contemporary, such as William Jay Smith, Kaye Starbird, Judith Nicholls, and Russell Hoban. Listen to this passage from Richard Edwards’s strange and beautiful poem, “Badgers”: “Badgers don’t jump when a vixon screams,/Badgers drink quietly from moonshiny streams,/Badgers dig holes in our dreams.”

I am a big fan of Eleanor Farjeon, so I was pleased to see three of her poems in this book. And take a look at the first stanza of Sue Cowling’s poem, “Pond”: “The pond is green as glass, the water slow,/It barely stirs the frills and fronds of weeds./Ponds have all day to dream, nowhere to go.”

The interior illustrations for My First Oxford Book of Poems are by eight different artists, so maybe it isn’t surprising that I thought they were a mixed bag. I’ve seen incredible poetry collections illustrated by various artists; however, some of the illustrations in this book are far more evocative than others. Like Hawthorn’s book, My First Oxford Book of Poems runs older, in spite of the title. I would recommend it for five- to eight-year-olds.

In comparing the two anthologies, I discovered that Hawthorn’s collection was more rollicking than Foster’s, jumping around from one subject to another and offering readers more funny poems. Foster’s collection had a more consistent tone—even with occasional touches of humor, it felt strongly imagistic, even haunting, to me.

Of course, no talk of poetry collections would be complete without the inimitable Lee Bennett Hopkins, so let’s look at his anthology, Climb into My Lap: First Poems to Read Together (Simon and Schuster, 1998). Like Foster’s book, it is divided into categories: Me! Secret Places, It’s So Funny! Some People, Worlds of Make-Believe, It’s Story Time! Little Hands and Fingers—Little Toes and Feet, and Good Night. You should know that Hopkins creates his collections, not only by looking at poems which are already out there, but by recruiting promising poets to write to the themes he’s selected.

Like Foster, Hopkins gets extra points for including Nancy Willard’s poem, “Magic Story for Falling Asleep.” But oh—I’m in shock! I just found WBN lurking two-thirds of the way through the book! (Not sure I’ll recover from the blow.) So much for the British Corollary. Perhaps we’re looking at the age of these editors? (I’ve gone from sounding anti-Brit to ageist in one fell swoop!)

Climb into My Lap is for a younger audience than the first two—I would recommend it for three- to seven-year-olds. The editor is particularly skilled at slipping back and forth between the pensive and the playful. The poems in this collection also strike me as being more straightforward, but in some cases this means they are less imagistic than the ones collected by Hawthorn and Foster. Still, the best poems in Climb into My Lap are lovely. Besides which, any collection that includes Deborah Chandra has got to be good! And Hopkins has chosen one of my favorite poems ever, Charlotte Zolotow’s “People,” which begins, “Some people talk and talk/and never say a thing./Some people look at you/and birds begin to sing.”

Kathryn Brown’s art for Hopkins’s anthology is just right, clear yet soft, as well as subtly multicultural. I don’t know which I like better, her cast of children or her day-and-night illustrations of the famous Quangle Wangle’s hat. (You should know that Climb into My Lap is out of print, so check it out at the library or track down a used copy.)

Jack Prelutsky’s contribution to this corner of the poetry world is Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Knopf, 1986). Prelutsky is known for writing humorous poems with a lot of strong-edged sounds and wordplay, which pretty much describes the tone of his anthology. One example would be Lenore M. Link's "Holding Hands," which starts out, "Elephants walking/Along the trails/Are holding hands/By holding tails...." Marc Brown’s illustrations are just as playful as the poems. This collection has great kid appeal and is well suited to the reading needs of three- to seven-year-olds. Plus, no sign of the dreaded WBN.

I have to say, I do think this is the only time I’ve ever seen a poem from Maurice Sendak’s wonderful Chicken Soup with Rice anthologized—“January.” The other surprise is a snippet of Dr. Seuss, “We have two ducks. One blue. One black....” (Which makes me wonder, how much did they have to pay for the privilege of using those?) Among the many other poets Prelutsky features are Bobbi Katz, Judith Viorst, Myra Cohn Livingston, Aileen Fisher, Karla Kushkin, and Lilian Moore. His collection is perfect for having fun with words and for getting started with poetry. I should point out that there are a lot of poems squeezed onto the pages of Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, but the visual organization is clear enough that all but the very youngest readers should be able to follow it.

Jane Yolen, AKA Madame Versatile, recently gave us another poetry collection for small children, Here’s a Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry (Candlewick, 2007). Her co-editor is Andrew Fusek Peters and her illustrator is Polly Dunbar. Which means that here is, not only a little poem, but the best of both worlds—American Yolen working with two Brits to create something that's simply gorgeous.

The collection is divided into four sections: Me, Myself and I; Who Lives in My House? I Go Outside; and Time for Bed. This book really, truly is for small children, probably ages two to five. It contains far fewer poems than Prelutsky’s collection, but the presentation is stunning, with only one or two poems per spread, each encompassed by light, fresh illustrations. Even the font is large and simple, sans serif so that a kindergartener could read it with some help.

The poets represented here are from both the U.S. and Great Britain. Though all of the poems are uncomplicated and many are funny, the editors manage to work in some nice imagery along the way. For example, here’s an excerpt from Berlie Doherty’s poem, “Grandpa”:“Grandpa’s hands are as rough as/Garden sacks/And as warm as pockets....” We also find “Bumblebee,” not the piece of writing for which Margaret Wise Brown is best known, but a poem with one of my favorite similes of all time: “Where are you taking/Your golden plunder/Humming along/Like baby thunder?”

Here’s a Little Poem avoids the indignity of “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”; instead we get bedtime poems like Dennis Lee’s, which begins, “Silverly,/Silverly,/Over the/Trees,/The moon drifts/By on a/Runaway/Breeze.”

I’ll add that any “first collection of poems,” even Yolen’s, should be preceded or at least joined by a good Mother Goose. The best one I’ve come across is My Very First Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie and brilliantly illustrated by Rosemary Wells (Candlewick, 1999). After whetting your young child’s appetite with Mother Goose, you might consider reading the anthologies I’ve described in the following order: Here’s a Little Poem, Climb into My Lap, Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, My First Oxford Book of Poems, and The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children. Once a week could even be poetry night at bedtime, with the other six nights saved for narrative and other picture books.

One final note: I’ve observed that most editors of poetry collections for children can’t resist slipping in a couple of their own poems. The question I always ask is, how do these poems hold up in comparison to the rest of the book? So here’s a quick report for you: Philip Hawthorn gives us “The Train from Loch Brane,” an adaptation of an anonymous poem called “Have You Ever Seen?” and “Classrhymes.” All three poems are pleasant, but not outstanding. John Foster does not include any of his own poems in his collection. Lee Bennett Hopkins offers up “My Name” and “Toy Telephone,” both clever and fun. He also retells a poem, “Five Great Big Dinosaurs.”

For his part, Jack Prelutsky gives us six poems: “Whistling,” “The House Mouse,” “Skeleton Parade,” “The Mistletoe,” “Sometimes,” and “Somersaults.” All six are well done, but I thought “Sometimes” was the most memorable. In any case, Prelutsky has much better poems in several of his own collections. Jane Yolen’s poems, “Recipe for Green” and “Dream Maker,” are both very good. I wasn’t as pleased by her daughter Heidi E.Y. Stemple’s poem, “Ice Cream Cone,” which is cute, but not striking.

These five anthologies are a way of dipping your toes into the friendly waters of children’s poetry. Eventually I’ll take a look at anthologies for slightly older children and then collections by individual poets. There are so many wonderful poets out there—Shel Silverstein, Kristine O’Connell George, and Valerie Worth are just a few of my favorites. But the five books I've talked about make a good starter set. Throw in the Mother Goose and you’re ready to play Pied Piper, leading your child toward an enduring love of words.