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Hello and welcome to this week’s Poetry Friday.  I will update this post with your posts throughout the day – in the meantime, please leave your links in the Comments below.

In honor of the mosaic of poetry that will make up the wonderful whole as created each week for Poetry Friday, I thought I’d highlight Jorge Luján’s gorgeous poem-turned-picture-book Sky Blue Accident/Accidente Celeste - beautifully translated by Elisa Amado and illustrated by Piet Grobler (Groundwood Books, 2007) (and the “beautifully” refers to both the translation and the illustrations, by the way).

Before the poem starts, two double-page spreads show a small boy cycling to school, at first concentrating hard on the task in hand and then being distracted by a bird in the sky…  And so:

Una mañana de brumas
me tropecé con el cielo
y a los pedazos caídos
los escondí e mi bolsillo.

Once on a misty morning
I crashed into the sky,
Then hid its broken pieces
In my pocket.

What follows is a joyous flight of imagination, as the child tries to show the pieces of sky to his teacher; and then all the children try and repair the hole in the sky by painting a new one, to get things back to normal (for without a complete sky “Lost clouds stumbled around/bumbling into corners,” – isn’t that a beautiful image? – and the moon is also behaving oddly…).  The boy then uses the fragments of the “real” sky to fill in the last remaining gaps.

The poem is a delight and Piet Grobler’s gorgeous illustrations are very clever as well as a joy to the eye – for they combine the flight of imagination in the poem (including a teacher who grows wings and flies out the window) with a school setting that has the boy drawing on his lined exercise paper; and there are also certain visual motifs that the reader catches up with eventually. You can see some pages from the Spanish edition on Jorge’s website.

So now we will see what kind of sky Poetry Friday brings us this week. Will it be cloudy, gray or blue – or maybe sparkly or rosy or velvet?  I can’t wait to find out… and if you have a moment on your hands while you’re here wondering too, do pause and watch this video of Jorge’s poem Tarde de Invierno/Winter Afternoon, illustrated my Mandana Sadat, and like Sky Blue Accident, beautifully translated by Elisa Amado and published by Groundwood Books (2006).  It’s still my favourite book video ever…

When PaperTigers’ book reviewer Abigail Sawyer mentioned to me that she is going to be hosting a Blog Carnival about bilingualism over at Speaking in Tongues today, she got me thinking. Again. I first started mulling over bilingual children’s books here in relation to Tulika Books, a publisher in India that produces bilingual books in many different Indian languages alongside English, and to former IBBY Preisdent and founder of Groundwood Books Patsy Aldana’s comments in an interview with PaperTigers, and I will quote them again here:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

I was surprised by Aldana’s dislike of bilingual books because I love them and my children love them, and I have found that they can be a joy for inquisitive children seeking to learn independently – but I do realise that our contexts are different. Aldana’s dislike of them seems to stem from their being a substitute for monolingual Spanish books in an English-biased market, and she has found a pragmatic way of providing books in their mother-tongue to the Latino community in North America.

We love reading bilingual books because, although our main vehicle is the English, having another language running alongside, often enhances the reading experience for us, especially where the setting of the story is culturally appropriate to the language. This is true even when we can’t read the script, because even without being able to understand it, we can sometimes pull out certain consistencies. Seeing the writing always provides a glimpse of that different culture.

One of my favorite books of the last few year’s is Jorge Luján’s Tarde de invierno/ Winter Afternoon, published by Groundwood Books – and without the original Spanish and the English lying alongside eachother, we would not have been able to appreciate so fully the simply gorgeous animation Jorge and his family produced of the book (watch it here). Some authors like Yuyi Morales effortlessly slide between English and Spanish (we love her delightful Señor Calavera and Grandma Beetle books, Just a Minute and Just in Case). Some books provide a parallel experience of language, like Demi’s Bamboo Hats and a Rice Cake or Ed Young’s Beyond the Great Mountains. None of these books is truly bilingual, in that they do not provide a similar reading experience regardless of which of the two languages you approach the story from – but they all offer a bridge between languages and cultures that is not to be understimated.

It would be very interesting to hear about the experiences and needs of truly bilingual parents and children. If you are bringing up bilingual children or have bilingual children in your class, do you or they seek out bilingual books? Are you frustrated by what’s out there –

An event on the first morning of the Bologna Book Fair set the tone for Aline’s and my enjoyment of the whole experience, when we heard British poet Michael Rosen and Argentine-Mexican poet Jorge Luján taking part in a packed-out seminar about “Poetry in Children’s Books”.

Michael Rosen started his presentation with an interactive recitation of his poem “This is the Hand” (here’s a link to it but “slip” in the 3rd stanza should read “slid”!), and then went on to talk about how he became a poet, almost despite the way poetry had been taught in schools when he was a boy (1950’s England: “we like poems where nothing happens and people are a little bit sad and don’t know why”!)…

As well as being a very entertaining speaker, who also charmed his audience with a poem he had written the day before about his day in Bologna, he had some very salient points to make about why it is so important to include poetry in the school curriculum. He compared reading a poem to looking at a photograph in an album: it freezes time for a moment and “you can put it up in front of you and can look at it again and again”. He pointed out that this kind of contemplation and reflection are very important for children and that in education there are not many opportunities to do this without having an answer to all the questions. Poetry provides a different way of investigating reality – through suggestion or illustration perhaps – which reverberates in people’s minds and opens the way to a different sort of dialogue. “Stories usually have to conclude; poems can end with a question.”

Jorge Luján began (more…)

Author: Shirin Yim Bridges
Illustrator: Sophie Blackall (on JOMB)
Published: 2002 Chronicle Books (on JOMB)
ISBN: 0811834905 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

The hush of dependable peaches and greens gently gives way to a crescendo of red in this thoughtfully unfolding, true story of a young girl with a dream — and the patient, respectful cracking of cultural constraints that made her dream come true.

You can help make a dream come true today by joining the effort to provide schooling and stability for autistic children in China. To learn more click here.

Author: Deborah Noyes
Illustrator: Sophie Blackall
Published: 2007 Candlewick Press (on JOMB)
ISBN: 0763624004 Chapters.ca Amazon.com

Delicately depicted in mint, peach and red, this beautifully worded legend shares the solitary heartbreak and secret unraveling of a young girl who shines light into her own uncertain future.

Other books mentioned:

• Goodnight Moon
• Gleam and Glow