Cinquains for National Poetry Month

This week I'm experimenting with the cinquain, a poetry form I've only tried once or twice before. I'm also rejoicing in spring rain and in National Poetry Month. Here's a link to Jama Ratigan's excellent roundup of April poetry events. Note that today's Poetry Friday is being hosted by Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge.

April

umbrellas bloom,

coloring paper skies

like kindergartners, drinking cups

of rain.

Wind chimes

telling stories

about birds, branches, clouds.

If they could they’d fly far and high,

singing.

Baby

stares at nothing

like a small Buddhist monk,

her meditations bigger than

planets.

Sore throat

like a nail file

scraping away my voice.

I have nothing to say, so it’s

okay.

Sudden

rain walks the roof

like construction workers.

Yelling, they hammer the sky and

the house.

Kate Coombs, 2013

all rights reserved 

Happy National Poetry Month!

A Review of Forest Has a Song by Amy Ludwig Vanderwater

Today is a happy day. It’s the release date of Amy Ludwig Vanderwater’s first poetry collection. If you haven’t heard of Amy, you should. I first “met” her in the poetry blog community last April, when I followed her poems through National Poetry Month, one for each letter of the alphabet and a few bonus poems. Amy has a very friendly and poem-filled blog, The Poem Farm. She actually lives on a farm in New York, where I suspect she takes walks

through the woods.

We can join her in Forest Has a Song, which takes us on a walk through the forest and the

seasons with a girl and her dog. The book is illustrated in light-filled watercolors by Robbin Gourley. We begin with rows of leaves on the endpapers, then a view of a house with a path leading to the woods on the title page. The oft-overlooked credits spread is especially pretty—a row of weedy grass stalks on a sky-implying background. Of course, our true journey begins with “Invitation,” a poem that starts with the girl’s words and ends with the words of the forest itself. Here is the entire poem:

Today

I heard

a pinecone fall.

I smell

a spicy breeze.

I see

Forest

wildly waving

rows of

friendly trees.

I’m here.

Come visit.

Please?

This is a good example of poet Vanderwater’s voice, clean and spare and true. Our walk continues with a “Dead Branch,” a haiku stick thrown to the girl’s dog. Then we meet “Chickadee,” who is afraid of the girl but is nevertheless attracted to the seeds she offers. As in the first poem, the poet gives us the girl’s voice followed by the bird’s. “Forest News” is next, in which the girl sees the tracks left by animals as the words in a newspaper. News about different animals is described in flowing lines. A couple of my favorites are “Young raccoons/Drink sips of creek” and “Here a possum/whiskery-wild/climbs a tree trunk/with her child.” The poem concludes:

Scribbled hints

in footprints

tell about the day.

I stop to read

the Forest News

before it’s worn away.

Our girl walks on, having encounters with unfurling “ferny frondy fiddleheads” and a “grandfather fossil,” a trilobite, before moving on to a tree frog and a lady’s slipper. There’s a sly bit of fairy tale humor in having those two poems on the same page since Vanderwater’s frog is courting and the lady’s slipper is the one dropped by “Forest Cinderella.” The frog poem, “Proposal,” begins rather desperately with:

Marry me.

Please marry me.

A tree frog calls

from tree to tree.

Hoping.

Hopping.

High above.

Crooning.

Plopping.

Finding love.

Notice the combination of romance and absurdity, as in “Crooning” followed by “Plopping.”

The girl is having a picnic with her family on the next spread, giving us “Spider” and the lullaby-like “Dusk.” Then the two night poems are especially nice. “Lichens” ends with a wise little twist and “First Flight” tells the story of a young owl’s first flight: “Mommy, I’m scared to be this high.” After that we see the girl and her dog back in the forest on their own, exploring moss and a sad little pile of bones: “I wonder/who will bury you?” We get a taste of “Wintergreen,” a moment of deer watching (and vice versa), “Home” in a rotten log, and the “Puff” of mushrooms ready to loose their spores. A “Warning” about poison ivy and the sound of “Woodpecker” finish off the summer: “In a red cap/he types poems/with his beak/upon a tree.”

The girl is waiting for the school bus as “Maples in October” decide to turn red. “Squirrel” has secrets, but can he remember them? Then we reach the poem that gave the book its name, “Song.” The girl tells us about the sounds of the forest, concluding:

Silence in Forest

never lasts long.

Melody

is everywhere

mixing in

with piney air.

Forest has a song.

A page turn. Snow has fallen, and snowflakes have voices. “Father cardinal” shows off: “Dramatically/he makes an entrance/through two birches/at stage right.” Finally, Forest bids us “Farewell,” again evoking the “spicy breeze” we smelled in the poem that began the collection, “Invitation.” The girl and her dog walk home.

Gourley’s illustrations are deliberately fair and spare, making a good match to Vanderwater’s poetic style. The girl appears with her brown Everydog on most of the spreads, leading us on a rambling tour of the forest. We get to see her parents and her little brother once or twice, as well. The subjects of the poems are called out in the artwork, but they support the poems rather than competing with them. The cover art is particularly lovely, as you can see.

Listen to the entire text of the title poem and take a look at more images from the book in the book trailer. Forest Has a Song is recommended by no less a luminary than J. Patrick Lewis, Children’s Poet Laureate of the Unite States: “With her first book of children’s poetry, Ms. VanDerwater has already arrived.”

I don’t know about you, but here where I live, Spring is starting to show her face. What better time to take a walk in the woods?

Note: Thanks to Clarion Books for providing me with a review copy of Forest Has a Song.

Springy Giveaway Winner

Daffodils don't grow very well here in Southern California for lack of a winter, but I have a pot of mini-daffs on my window sill and a daffodil screensaver up on my computer. I will confess, in the interest of veracity, not smugness, that the tree by my front gate is blooming like a bride. Which gives me L.A. guilt as I read the news on the Internet about drivers on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago being stuck in the snow and about the blizzards on the East Coast. Anyway, spring being here is clearly some kind of illusion, or, as Amy of Amy's Library of Rock put it in the comments, "Okay, silly California person with your warped science fiction climate!" But you can at least wish and hope for spring, and for daffodils, even with snow piled up to the rafters, right?

In any case, we have a winner! Saskmom will be receiving a signed copy of my picture book, The Secret-Keeper.

Springy Giveaway

Hi all! I have given away copies of my MG fantasy books every so often here at Book Aunt, but I haven't given away a copy of my picture book for some time. And it has a spring/rejuvenation theme in there somewhere...

So leave a spring comment in the next (almost) two weeks, by midnight on February 1, and then I'll draw names and send an autographed copy of The Secret-Keeper to the winner. It's an original folktale, which I know very well is a contradiction in terms, but I suspect you know what I mean, right?

Anyway, in your comment, please share either a spring thought or a happy secret, i.e, something nice you haven't mentioned to anyone else yet. It can be something small like "The bush out front is starting to bloom" or something upbeat like "Passed a kid on the street today who gave me such a great grin and a hello as he went by." (Now, I'm in L.A., and I realize spring isn't there quite yet on the East Coast and in certain other parts of the world, but you can look forward to it with your comment!) Of course, you can always recommend a spring-appropriate book as an alternative.

Do be sure you're reachable, whether by your regular link or an e-mail address or by checking back on February 2nd. Thanks!

(And yes, I ship prizes internationally. I hate to leave anyone out.)

Note: Jacket art and illustrations in general were created by the wonderful Heather M. Solomon.

Three Bird Books for Spring

It’s the quintessential image of spring: three blue eggs in a robin’s nest. And so I give you three books, each as surprising as a new egg. Two of them are recent arrivals, while the third is out of print. Each captures the poetry of birds in a way I think Emily Dickinson would have appreciated. Birds are fantastic metaphors, after all. Their eggs represent new life and their flight represents hope and freedom. Remember Dickinson’s poem? “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all....”

Birdsong by Audrey Wood and Robert Florczak

Birdsong is out of print, but it’s still a favorite of mine. Readers will travel around the United States for a day, bird watching with children in different states as they go. The text is simple: “Caw-caw-caw—swaying on telephone wires, jaunty crows banter at dawn. Missy and Deni awaken to birdsong.” A look at the key on the back cover tells us that these kids live in West Virginia, that the birds they hear are American crows, and that the flowers in the page border are Big rhododendron. Next it’s on to cardinals in Arizona and rock pigeons in New York. Fourteen birds later, evening falls with an owl calling in Michigan.

Robert Florczak’s illustrations are quietly appealing as well as accurate. In nearly every spread, one or two children play or hike or work while noticing the birds calling nearby.

Birdsong didn’t hit it big like the author’s book, The Napping House, but I loved sharing it with my students. We attempted to guess the states and flowers before peeking at the back of the book, and of course we tried out each birdsong. The songs are transcribed well, so they’re easy to imitate. This is unabashedly a concept book, with the slimmest imaginable narrative arc. But Birdsong shows young readers something new, a way of listening to the world. After you’ve read it, you’ll find yourself noticing birdsongs all around you. It turns out Earth has a soundtrack.

Birds by Kevin Henkes

Birds is the work of an amazingly talented author-illustrator, Kevin Henkes. He is well known for writing a number of picture books about mice as schoolchildren, including Owen and Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. He then turned his hand to middle grade fiction with books like Olive’s Ocean, a 2004 Newbery Honor book. More recently, Henkes has been making picture books for a slightly younger crowd, say two- to five-year-olds instead of four- to seven-year-olds. He’s very good at that, too, winning the 2005 Caldecott for Kitten’s First Full Moon and rave reviews for Old Bear and A Good Day.

Birds is Henkes’s latest picture book, really an illustrated free verse poem. At first its narrator is unseen, but like Audrey Wood’s characters, she begins her day with birdsong. The child then tells us a series of seemingly random things about birds. She remarks on their colors and sizes before giving an anecdote, a what if, an even more fanciful what if, and so on. As the book progresses, metaphor becomes more and more important in a rising way that may remind you of a bird taking flight. Here’s one example partway through: “Sometimes in winter, a bird in a tree looks like one red leaf left over.”

Birds makes a deliberate, delicate transition from the factual to the metaphorical, the way a fine green vein travels through a spring leaf. I think maybe Henkes is saying that bird facts are great, but the free-winged beauty a bird brings to our world is even better. Whatever his message, his book gives me spring fever, a desire to run through the grass barefoot and, like his young narrator, sing into the sunshine.

How to Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham

I ordered this book because I’d read the author's “Let’s Get a Pup,” Said Kate! and liked it very much, especially the funny, friendly illustrations. Later I found out that How to Heal a Broken Wing had won the Charlotte Zolotow and Cybils awards for best picture book of 2008 and was an ALA Notable Children’s Book.

It is very difficult to write a tender book without being alarmingly sentimental, but Bob Graham knows the value of understatement. A little boy in a big city finds an injured pigeon on the way home with his working mother. He insists on rescuing the bird, and his parents help him care for it while it heals. Nothing special? Just listen to the first page: “High above the city, no one heard the soft thud of feathers against glass.” On the next page, we read simply, “No one saw the bird fall.” Graham's language is gently lovely, but his illustrations make How to Heal a Broken Wing soar. With simple lines and just a few colors, Graham paints a vast cityscape that dwarfs the bird and the child at the center of his tale. Yet he also uses smaller, graphic novel-style sequences to illustrate parts of the story. The author-illustrator has a knack for pacing his close-ups and wide-angle shots. The blue-tinged palette lends a slightly melancholy air to most of the narrative, then surprises by leading us to the top of the sky. And the same type of slightly comical characters Graham drew for “Let’s Get a Pup” read here as sublimely ordinary, led by our small hero, Everychild.

This book isn’t just about helping a hurt pigeon, it’s about keeping your eyes open in a world where too many people have their eyes closed. It is also about hope. As the author puts it, "A loose feather can't be put back...but a broken wing can sometimes heal." For some reason, How to Heal a Broken Wing reminds me of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. I think it’s because both books give me a bone-deep feeling of being glad to be alive and human.

The crepe myrtles in my town are blooming pinkly and the birds are calling from dawn to dusk. Even in sunny California, the world changes when spring comes. Wherever you are, and however much your own neighborhood has bloomed, I suggest you celebrate with one of these picture books. If you're in the mood for more bird books, I also highly recommend First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, An Egg Is Quiet by Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long, and an out-of-print folktale called The Language of Birds by Rafe Martin and Susan Gaber.