How to use this Page

Hypnotize a Tiger: Poems About Just About Everything
By Calef Brown
Christy Ottaviano Books, Henry Holt (an imprint of Macmillan)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9928-7
For ages 9-12

Why do I do this to myself? Let me tell you something about how I review. Board books? Pshaw. I can take one and write a nine-paragraph review parsing precisely why it is that Bizzy Bear’s preferred companions are dogs and bunnies. Nonfiction? Lay it on me. I’ll take infinite pleasure in discussing the difference between informational texts when I was a child (long story short, they sucked) and our current golden age. But there is one book genre that lays me flat. Stops me short. Makes it exceedingly difficult for me to get my head in order. Truly, children’s poetry books are the hardest to review. I don’t know exactly why this is. They are the most unloved of the books for kids. No American Library Association accredited awards are made specifically for them. They get checked out of libraries one month a year (April = National Poetry Month) and then lie forgotten. Yet so many of them are bite-sized wallops of greatness. Hypnotize a Tiger by Calef Brown is one of these chosen few. Not many poetry books for kids sport blurbs from Daniel Pinkwater (who found a soul mate in Brown’s art) to Jack Gantos to The Book of Life director Jorge R. Gutierrez. And few author/illustrators are allowed to go as positively wacky and wild as Brown does here. From tomato ultimatums and loofah tortes to velocipede odes and dodgebull (rather than dodgeball) you honestly never know where the book is going next. And you’re grateful for it.

So if it’s so great (and it is) why is reviewing a book of this sort the devil to do? There are any number of reasons. When reviewing a book with, say, a plot, it’s awfully easy for me to merely recap the plot, dish on the characters, bring up some single strange or scintillating point, then close it all down with a conclusion. Easy peasy. But poetry’s not really like that. There’s no plot to Hypnotize a Tiger. There’s not even a running gag that keeps cropping up throughout the pages. Each poem is its own little world. As a result, I’m stuck generalizing about the poems as a whole. And because we are dealing with 84-85 (depending on how you count) of them in total, I’m probably going to end up saying something about how some of the poems work and others don’t. This is kind of a cheat when you’re reviewing a collection of this sort because almost no children’s poetry book is absolutely perfect (Example A: The fact that Shel Silverstein wrote “Hug-a-War” . . . I rest my case). They will always consist of some verses that work and others that do not. In the end, the best I can hope for when reviewing poetry is to try to find something that makes it different from all the other poetry books published in a given year. Fortunately for me, Mr. Brown is consistently interesting. As Pinkwater said in his blurb, “He is a bulwark against mediocrity.”

I’m very interested in the question of how to get kids around to reading poetry. My own daughter is four at this time and we’ve found that Shel Silverstein’s poetry books make for good bedtime reading (though she’s still thrown off by the occasional grotesquerie). For many children, Silverstein is the gateway drug. But Calef Brown, though he swims in Shel’s surrealism soaked seas, is a different breed entirely from his predecessor. Where Shel went for the easy silly ideas, Brown layers his ridiculousness with a bit of sophistication. Anyone could write a poem about waking up to find a beehive attached to the underside of their chin. It takes a Calef Brown to go one step further and have the unfortunate soul consider the monetary implications. Or to consider the verbal capabilities of Hoboken-based gnomes. So Hypnotize a Tiger becomes a book meant for the kid with a bit of prior poetry knowledge under their belt. You wouldn’t hand this title to a reluctant reader. You’d give it to the kid who’d already devoured all the Silverstein and Prelutsky and came to you asking, “What else you got?” That kid might be ready.

It is useful to note that you need to read this book aloud as well. There should be a warning sticker on the cover that says as much. Not that Brown makes it easy for you. Take the poem “Hugh”, for example. Short and simple it reads, “Meet my Belgian friend / He lives near Bruges, on a farm. / His name is Hugh Jarm.” Then at the bottom one of the tiny interstitial poems reads, “I once had a dream I was visiting Bruges – / snacking on chocolates while riding a luge.” Now the correct pronunciation of “Bruges” isn’t really necessary in the first poem, though it helps. The little tiny poem, however, is interesting because while it works especially well when you pronounce it correctly, you could probably mangle the wordplay easy peasy and still end up with a successful poem. SLJ probably said it best when they mentioned in their review of the book that, “Though there is more than one line that does not roll easily off the tongue and awkward rhymes abound, it is easy to see this clumsiness as part of the spirit of the collection.”

The subtitle of the collection is “Poems About Just About Everything” and that’s a fairly accurate representation. It does not mean, however, that there isn’t an internal logic to what’s being included here. There’s a chapter of animal poems, of people, insects, vehicles, schools, food, and then more esoteric descriptions like “Facts Poetic”, “Word Crashes”, and “Miscellaneous Silliness.” No poem directly applies to another, but they still manage to work together in tandem fairly well.

I don’t think it’s a serious criticism of a book to say that it’s not for all audiences. Calef Brown is an acquired taste. A taste best suited to the cleverest of the youngsters, absolutely, but acquired just the same. Not everyone is drawn to his style, and more fool they. To my mind, there is room enough in this world for any Calef Brown collection you can name. This book doesn’t have the widely popular feel of, say, a We Go Together but nor is the author writing poems simply to hear himself speak. Hypnotize a Tiger is a book built to please fans of creative curated silliness. Don’t know if you’ll like it? There’s only one way to find out. Pick this puppy up and read it to a kid. The book may surprise you (and so might the kid!).

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• A Pond Full of Ink by Annie M.G. Schmidt
• The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask by JonArno Lawson
• Food Hates You, Too and Other Poems by Robert Weinstock

Misc:

• I think this may honestly constitute the greatest class visit of all time.

Nest, Nook and Cranny
By Susan Blackaby
Illustrated by Jamie Hogan
Charlesbridge
$15.95
ISBN: 978-1-58089-350-3
Ages 5-12
On shelves now

I don’t know about kids in other parts of the country but in New York City kids get a particular assignment, usually around their second or third grade year. When the leaves have long since fallen but spring is still a long ways away we’ll get parents and children alike stomping into our libraries with specific requests: “I need a book on wetlands.” “Deserts”. “Arctic tundra”. “Do you have anything on woodlands?” I’m never entirely certain what to call these assignments. Searches for natural environments, perhaps? Whatever the case, our shelves begin to deplete and we search in vain for new titles to purchase for when the next round of requests pour in the following year. All this was in the back of my mind as I read Susan Blackby’s book of understated natural poems in Nest, Nook and Cranny. It’s a book that was accidentally shelved in my library system in the habitat and ecology section of my library, before someone noticed and reassigned it to the poetry section. It is indeed a series of poems, but I’m not so sure our kooky catalogers weren’t right in the first place. Teachers of the habitat assignments should consider using poems like Blackaby’s to bring to life the environments they are required to educate their students upon. With her words as an aid, kids won’t just the facts about a place. They’ll get the feel, the sounds, and the veritable smells as well. Here’s to poetry with a purpose then.

Desert, Grassland, Shoreline, Wetland, and Woodland. Meet five different habitats, home to an untold wealth of animals, bugs and variegated critters. In the “Before You Begin” section at the start, Ms. Blackaby freely acknowledges that the animals she ascribes to one environment or another sometimes mean bupkiss. “Thanks to accommodations or adaptations or both, some creatures can live anyplace.” That taken care of, she plunges into the poems. Using everything from villanelles to free verse, triolets to cinquains, Blackaby gives each habitat its own special feel. We read about a “dreamy home for beavers feeling dozy” or secluded places from “sandy strand to rocky scarp”. There are great lumbering bears emerging in the spring and coyotes that “hunt for jumpy prey” before becoming “jumpy prey” themselves. The end of the book contains a section of facts on different habitats and a Writing Poetry section that takes each poem and describes it at length.

Near the end of the book Blackaby explains that her poem about a bat is based on a Burmese poetic form called a “than-bauk”. She explains how it works and how in the third line “the second syllable rhymes with the third syllable in Line 2″. This is followed closely by a confession that “I cheated a little bit in line 3 by leaning on assonance and ignoring the word ending, which bends the rule without completely breaking it.” Blackaby’s fondness for assonance over rhyme was something I’d noticed long before I read this note of hers, but it was nice to hear her say it straight out. When I was a kid I was a very particular child with a definite sense of how poems worked. They rhymed. End of discussion. Over the years I’ve had to beat that belief out of myself, and for the most part I’ve been successful, but there are mo

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors
By Joyce Sidman
Illustrated by Beckie Prange
$17.00
ISBN: 978-0-618-71719-4
Ages 6-10
On shelves now.

I believe that there are different muses of children’s literature. You have you Beautiful Spine muses, your Great Editor muses, your Awe-Inspiring Marketing muses, and your Copyediting Magnificence muses. Each one of these references those elements of the production of a book that authors and illustrators cannot wholly control. In terms of picture books, however, the greatest muse of all these, the big mama muse on high, would have to be the Serendipity Muse. This is the muse that pairs great authors with great illustrators to produce books of unparalleled beauty. And as I see it, poet Joyce Sidman and artist Beckie Prange must have independent alters dedicated to this muse tucked in a back corner of their gardening sheds or something. How else to explain their slam bang pairing? Besides a clever editor, of course. I mean first we saw them working together on Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems, which immediately went on to win a highly coveted Caldecott Honor. Now this year we get to see their newest collaboration Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors. Much like Water Boatman this new pairing combines factual information with poems and pictures, but its focus is entirely different. And, of course, it’s an equal pleasure to both ears and eyes. The muse knows her stuff.

“Ubiquitous (yoo-bik-wi-tuhs): Something that is (or seems to be) everywhere at the same time.” Imagine having to select those denizens of earth that at one time or another were or are ubiquitous. The species that have managed to stay in existence long after most have gone extinct. It can’t be easy but poet Joyce Sidman has her ways. In a series of fourteen poems she examines everything from the earliest bacteria on the globe to the very dandelions beneath our feet. Each subject gets a poem about its life and existence, and then Ms. Sidman provides accompanying non-fiction information about the subject. So in the case of coyotes, the poem “Come with Us!” is told in the voice of the coyotes themselves, urging others to “Come drink in the hot odors, / come parry and mark and pounce.” On the opposite page we then learn the Latin term for coyotes, how long they’ve been on this earth, their size, and any other pertinent information about them. Beckie Prange’s linocuts and hand-colored watercolors perfectly offset both the grandeur and the humor of Sidman’s work. A Glossary of terms can be found in the back.

Sidman’s poems could easily have all been the same format. They could have all had the same ABAB or AABB structure. Instead, they mix things up a bit. Here we can see concrete poems and poems that follow ABAB with AABB. And some, like the squirrel poem “Tail Tale” (which is my favorite in the book) don’t even rhyme. This constant change keeps r

Sharing the Seasons: A Book of Poems
Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Illustrated by David Diaz
Margaret K. McElderry Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
$21.99
ISBN: 978-1-4169-0210-4
Ages 8-12
On shelves now

Yesterday I was frustrated. Very very frustrated. I’m a children’s librarian. Patrons tell me what they desire and I find just the right book for the right occasion. Recently a fellow walked into my children’s room with a simple request. He was going to read to a group of preschoolers and he wanted easy books on the seasons. This is one of those seemingly simple requests that can make your mind go blank faster than anything. After gaping like a fish for approximately a minute my brain started churning up a couple potential goodies from the depths. One such book was Sharing the Seasons: A Book of Poems. I figured that even if the kids were too young to hear all the poems, at least they’d like to hear some of them, and maybe get a little knocked out by the images. Alas, our copy was missing (grumble grumble grump) but at least I was able to conjure up a copy of Old Bear by Kevin Henkes instead. Just the same, I’ll be replacing our missing copy of Seasons and pronto. Here we have some of the finest minds working in children’s poetry today, selected for this magnificent collection of seasonal verse. It’s just the thing to welcome in a new time of year and say goodbye to the old. And the pretty pictures don’t hurt much either.

Four seasons. Twelve poems apiece. In this way, poet Lee Bennett Hopkins has culled a wide selection of poets and their poems, weaving their verses into a single book. Quotes from famous sources begin each season, as when we read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s lusty “Spring in the world! And all things are made new!” With great care and timing, a passel of poets tap into those elements in each season that speaks both to child and adult readers. “Suddenly Green” by James Hayford says that “Our trees have grown skin / And birds have moved in.” Meanwhile Rebecca Kai Dotlich admits that she is “Bewitched by Autumn”, conjuring up Halloween with its “bits of legend in a broth”. By the end, every season has had its say, the last by Sanderson Vanderbilt tying it all together, speaking of the boy who shovels the dirty snow, “helping spring come.” Backmatter includes Acknowledgments, an Index of Titles, and Index of Authors, and an Index of First Lines,

I think I got my copy of this book after a different reviewer. I say this because inside my copy was a note with individual poems listed, one by one. Poems like “August Heat” by Anonymous and “Summer Sun” by Elizabeth Upton. I’m not entirely certain what these poems have in common except that each one presents a pitch perfect tone to the season in question. But then, all the poems do that. In some kids will recognize the truth of what the poem says as when Rebecca Kai Dotlich writes that a wild rainstorm is “proud as a prank”. Othe

Suzie Bitner Was Afraid of the Drain
By Barbara R. Vance
Copperplate Publishing
$17.95
ISBN: 978-0-615-31444-0
Ages 7-12
On shelves now.

When I was a kid, children’s poetry certainly existed but as far as I knew nobody was out there actively promoting the idea that I read the stuff. Our schools didn’t have Poetry Month. Poem In Your Pocket Day was hardly the norm. And the idea of a Children’s Poet Laureate? Unheard of! Absurd! Still, I read a little poetry on my own. There was always Jack Prelutsky, who I considered the poor man’s Shel Silverstein. Now Silverstein THAT was a dude who knew what appealed to kids. Though he had an odd tendency to traipse into the world of cutesiness (his hug poem = an ugh poem), his work tapped into children’s fears and sick twisted humors better than anyone. And books like Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic looked better than the other books too. They were big thick books with black and white illustrations on pure white pages with plenty of space around the words. Variations on this form of published have existed throughout the decades since. Most recently would be Barbara R. Vance and her collection of poems in Suzie Bitner Was Afraid of the Drain. Not tapping into the sheer weirdness of a Silverstein, Vance still provides looks at the familiar aspects of a child’s life and couches those observations in rhyme.

A collection of 124 poems, Barbara Vance explores the ephemera of childhood. Some poems take on the realistic problems lots of kids face. Things like “My Brother’s Bike” or “Bored” or (maybe just a little less common) “Worms for Pets”. Other poems stray into the fantastical, like “Pantry Party”, “A Ghost Who Loves Movies”, and “Don’t Make the Tooth Fairy Angry.” Each poem is couched on pure white space with small interstitial illustrations to accompany. The book also includes an index of the poems, both by title and by first line.

It took me a while as I read this book to realize that Vance’s poetry style stands opposite most of the poems we read for kids today. I’ll tell you how a usual funny poem for children stands. You read about a situation, say a kid raking leaves, a kid with braces, or a kid who likes to dress up. You read through as the kid describes their situation. Then you get to the end of the poem and the last sentence is a funny surprise kicker you didn’t see coming. This is sort of an established form in children’s poetry. We’ve come to expect it. I certainly (and without really realizing it) had come to expect it, so it was with a bit of a shock that I realized that mostly Vance avoids this particular style. The closest thing you’re going to get to a kicker on that poem about the kid who likes to dress up is a suggestion that you might like dressing up too. And this is fine. Vance is totally within her rights to keep her poems from looking like everybody else’s. Sh