Poems for an Autumn Day

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.

A Review of A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber

If you are a fan of adult sci-fi, you may be familiar with David Weber's Honor Harrington series. I've read most of the books, and while they can get bogged down in lengthy descriptive, technological, or political passages, I really like Weber's space opera heroine. Now the author joins the ranks of adult writers crossing over into the hot YA market with a prequel novel about an ancestor of Honor Harrington named Stephanie.

Twelve-year-old Stephanie's parents have moved the family to a colony planet named Sphinx in the Star Kingdom of Manticore. An aspiring zoologist/botanist and forest ranger, Stephanie is excited until she is told that she cannot explore the forests around her new home without adult supervision. After all, the planet is home to some very dangerous species, most notably the hexapuma, an oversized puma-like predator. Stephanie's parents try to keep her occupied by giving her glider lessons, and her mother challenges her to solve a mystery: who or what has been stealing small amounts of celery from the colonists' experimental farms and greenhouses?

Then we hit Chapter Two and find out that Stephanie's isn't the only point of view in the book. Many of the chapters are presented from the perspective of Climbs Quickly, a member of the sentient species that will come to be known to humans as treecats—imagine a six-legged cross between a squirrel and a cat, with the forepaws more like a monkey's and therefore capable of using tools. For now, though, Climbs Quickly and his people are keeping out of sight of the "two-legs." Spying on them, even. So far, only their incredible attraction to celery puts them at risk for discovery.

What's really fun is that the treecats (who, like most tribal societies, call themselves the People) are trying to figure out if the two-legs can communicate with each other. The treecats communicate mind to mind, and their initial observations lead them to call the new species they are observing "mind blind."

After Stephanie sets about solving the mystery of the celery thieves, she and Climbs Quickly cross paths. Their meeting is all the more astonishing because Stephanie and Climbs Quickly form an unexpected psychic bond. The discovery of a new sentient species is big news, but Stephanie keeps it to herself for the time being. When the girl takes an ill-fated glider trip over the forest to hone in on Climbs Quickly's psychic location, she runs into trouble. Only the intervention of the secretive treecats can save her. But that would mean blowing their cover...

As the story evolves, some interesting ideas about what it means to be sentient are bandied about. In addition, we see how politics affects interactions with primitive tribes, let alone brand-new species. Stephanie becomes the treecats' champion, but just how well can a twelve-turned thirteen-year-old protect these beings from the various human threats that stalk them?

Stephanie finds a few allies and makes mistakes, but she is able to rescue her new friends, who have previously rescued her. Her bond with Climbs Quickly (or Lionheart, as she names him) doesn't overcome all of the language barriers between the two species, but it's a start.

Besides a broader environmental theme, A Beautiful Friendship addresses how advanced civilizations assess and affect less civilized groups. You'll probably smile, as I did, when you hear how one scientist tries to explain away the treecats' net-weaving activities on the basis of animal instinct. Climbs Quickly's people are hunter-gatherers, but they begin taking notes on what the humans are up to right away and apply some of what they have learned.

The author does wax pompous in spots, and the storytelling isn't always fast paced. But I thought that overall, the suspense built nicely. I especially liked seeing the difference between Stephanie's point of view and Climbs Quickly's viewpoint.

Young Stephanie, like her descendant, Honor, is a great character. She is smart, strong, stubborn, brave, and completely fallible. Our heroine's high-tech hang-gliding, along with her grace under pressure, add to the more adventurous parts of the plot.

I also appreciate the author's efforts to be properly scientific, e.g., by explaining how an alien species would be able to digest a human-grown plant. Another fun fact is the way the massive, terrifying hexapumas have a healthy respect for what an entire throng of angry treecats can do.

Fans of the adult Honor Harrington series will either love this book because it gives them a glimpse of the heroine's heritage (and because they get the celery reference right away) or hate it because it's written for a younger audience, but preteens and teens who like science fiction or even animal stories will probably enjoy A Beautiful Friendship.

Note for Worried Parents: There's some animal violence, shooting, and peril here. Even though the book is listed as YA, I think it's an appropriate read for the science-minded tween crowd, maybe 10- to 12-year-olds.

Also: You might want to stop by David Weber's website. It's rather complex!

Book Picks: If you like this book, try Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle, the Dragon and Thief books by Timothy Zahn, Fledgling and Saltation by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Flight of the Outcast by Brad Strickland, and Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein.

Update: Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out that this book is not about a young Honor Harrington, but about an ancestor of hers named Stephanie. Corrections have been made accordingly.

A Review of Animal Aha! by Diane Swanson

Most of the nonfiction I read as a child bored me. The only nonfiction books I remember liking were the World Book Encyclopedia, which I sometimes read randomly to entertain myself, and some books called Animals Do the Strangest Things, Birds Do the Strangest Things, and Insects Do the Strangest Things. In fact, I wondered why, if animals and birds and insects were out there doing such strange things, more of the books in the library couldn’t talk about that, instead of what they did say, which seemed like a whole lot of blah-blah to me.

I’m still more hooked on fiction than nonfiction, but I am happy to report that children’s nonfiction has improved tremendously since I was young. Simply having more photos—and having them be in color—is a great start. The advent of the Eyewitness series has also upped the ante. As a teacher, I love bringing those books to my students, especially reluctant readers. Like my childhood encyclopedias, their pocket-sized pieces of text and wonderful photographs draw kids in. I know some have objected to the way they jump around, but then, science is often sold to us in schools as lists of facts, so what’s the difference?

Fortunately, there are alternatives. After you’ve gotten children involved with books like Eye Wonder and Eyewitness, you can introduce them to some books that don’t, in fact, jump around. Another thing I’ve noticed while teaching is that kids are inclined to think of science as a done deal, with all of those facts conquered and ordered and laid out in boxes beneath pins for their perusal. To show them that science is actually ongoing and constantly changing, we need books along the lines of Animal Aha! Thrilling Discoveries in Wildlife Science. Here’s how the introduction puts it:

Scientists work hard to uncover some of the amazing things that animals do. They spend thousands of hours planning experiments, making observations, spotting patterns, and analyzing results. Their efforts call for plenty of patience and loads of persistence. But that all pays off big time when they discover something new—something no one has ever seen before. As you might imagine, finding an AHA in research is a big thrill.

This book has five short chapters, one for each discovery. The discoveries are told in story form, letting young readers share in the scientists’ aha moments. Further facts and explanations and a history of the research leading up to the key observation follow. For example, the first chapter tells about the discovery of a gorilla using tools, adding that previously, among the great apes, only chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans have been seen doing that. In this case, a female gorilla crossing a swampy area in the Congo rainforest was observed breaking off a tree branch and using it, not only to support herself, but to check the depth of the water as she went.

Animal Aha! provides an appealing array of animals and discoveries: we go on to read about elephants looking at themselves in mirrors, dolphins demonstrating simple math skills, parrots speaking with meaning, pythons growing bigger hearts in order to digest their prey, and cockroaches learning better at night than in the morning—kind of like some people. Perhaps most intriguing is finding out how the scientists set up viable experiments for verifying things such as animal thought processes. I especially like the way the elephant research illustrates how a poorly designed experiment can yield inaccurate results: Earlier attempts to find out if elephants could recognize that they were being reflected in mirrors had used smaller mirrors so that elephants could only see their faces. Once scientists offered the pachyderms jumbo-size mirrors, the elephants quickly conducted their own experiments and concluded that they were seeing themselves.

Each chapter in Animal Aha! begins with a small sidebar of summary points titled Fast Facts and includes plenty of nice photos of the subject, some from the actual experiments. Each chapter then ends with a sidebar called Fun Facts. The book has an index, as well. My two favorite Fun Facts are “Like your fingerprints, a gorilla’s noseprints are unique” and “An elephant’s ear can weight as much as a slim woman, about 50 kilograms (110 pounds).”

Besides offering up active science about intriguing topics, Animal Aha! is written in a friendly, clear way at a second or third grade level. Diane Swanson is apparently the author of many other nonfiction books, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for them. For now, I am happy to report that animals are still doing the strangest things!

A Review of Secret of the Singing Mice...and More! by Ana Maria Rodriguez

Secret of the Singing Mice has one of the coolest titles ever, but how does it compare to Animal Aha? The books are very similar in design, actually. This one also presents five cases of animal research in five small chapters. The title chapter is especially compelling. Like bats, whales, certain insects, and a few other rodents, mice make some sounds that are so high-pitched humans can’t hear them. These songs are produced by male mice when they meet female mice, and scientists recorded them and were able to play them back and analyze them at a lower decibel. To their surprise, they found out that a mouse’s “love song” isn’t just a single note, but a little pattern—and each male mouse’s song is unique. (I’m picturing American Idol for mice now.)


Three of the five chapters in this book are about animal sounds. Like the mice, Richardson’s ground squirrel sometimes makes ultrasonic noises. The calls are part of the ground squirrel’s repertoire of warning signals, and the book details how scientists figured out when these calls would be advantageous to use—or not, depending on how near a predator might be. The third chapter about animal calls also focuses on an animal that can make ultrasonic noise: bats. It turns out baby bats “babble,” playing with sounds the way human infants experiment with vowels and syllables before learning to make words and sentences.

The two chapters which aren’t about sound give us case studies involving smell and vision. The star-nosed mole is already a bizarre creature, but it turns out to have an intriguing habit discovered by scientist Kenneth Catania: while looking for food underwater, the bat breathes bubbles out of its strange nose to touch potential food in the murky water, then snorts the bubbles back in to check them for smells. The chapter about vision introduces us to a little rodent called the degu that can see ultraviolet light—but what for? The answer has to do with the degu’s urine, which is bright with UV rays!

I was a little thrown by this book’s emphasis on sound in three of the five chapters. Part of me wanted to see a chapter for each of the five senses. But then, describing three sound experiments gives students the opportunity to compare different scientists’ approaches to similar questions, which is certainly valuable.

Singing Mice is written on a second or third grade level. The book offers us various sidebars, though some contain information that could have been worked into the text. I especially liked the idea of sidebars called Meet the Scientists, but was disappointed by their lack of detail. The font size in this book is quite small, which might be overwhelming for reluctant readers. Some chapters seem a little short on photos, as well. I was pleased to discover experiments at the end of the chapters until I realized that only chapters one and five had them. Of course, it would have been nice to see an experiment for each chapter. In addition to an index, Singing Mice provides chapter notes at the end of the book, giving us specific sources for the information in the text. This is not only useful, but is also good modeling for students being asked to document their own report writing. The book is part of a series called Animal Secrets Revealed, and I’m going to try to track down some of the other titles, particularly Secret of the Puking Penguins...And More.

Secret of the Singing Mice gives us a clear picture of how five science teams conduct their animal research. Again, these science stories are powerful examples for students who might not otherwise understand how all those “science facts” they encounter in school are generated. In the midst of recent talk in the news regarding problems with education in the United States, I’ve read that pursuit of careers in the hard sciences is on the wane. Good nonfiction showing kids dynamic, creative science engagement should be part of the solution.