Sing it: We Are America

The last Cybils Poetry finalist did not really work for me. Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers put together a beautiful book, We Are America: A Tribute From the Heart, that combined Walt Whitman-like verses with painterly art depicting scenes from American history, concentrating on the common people who built this country.

Unfortunately, and this says a lot more about me than about the book, I couldn't really connect. I always felt like I was reading in a cathedral or a museum, with constant reminders to be quiet and reverent. Strong immigrants stood proudly next to victims of prejudice or oppression, and the need to be educated interfered with my ability to appreciate the words or the art. I also couldn't keep my fifth grader interested; I believe he also sensed an attempt to force learning on him and he squirmed away with more than his usual distaste for poetry. So it's undoubtedly a beautiful book, but shallow me could not appreciate it.

I'll go back to Lear nonsense or something.

Poems for Science: Ubiquitous

I have successfully dragged my youngest son through the last of the Cybils Poetry finalists with me: Joyce Sidman's Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors. P cannot be counted among poetry's biggest fans; his normal instinct is to run screaming. He regards my hobby of memorizing poetry as mild insanity, so including a poem a night in our bedtime reading was a major concession on his part.

However, with this book, he allowed several poems daily, sometimes taking turns reading them with me. Sidman hooked him with science. Ubiquitous traces the history of the planet Earth through life forms, starting with a beautiful color coded time-string showing when each selection developed. We flipped back to the inside cover every few poems to see how much time had passed. Each poem included a facing page with facts about subject and its development, often new information for me as well as P. Some of the poems we liked, some we didn't, some we classified as prose with fancy line breaks, but we talked about both the facts and the poetry. This was a joy for me, and we even had a favorite:

The Lichen We
(after Siegfried Sassoon's "Man and Dog")

Who's this -- alone with stone and sea?
It's just the lowly Lichen We
the alga I, the fungus me;
together, blooming quietly.

...

Dusky Poetry: Dark Emperor

I read this as a picture book, which means I forced my fourth grader to read it with me. Unfortunately, he has a violent allergy to poetry, so the Cybils Poetry Finalist Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night by Joyce Sidman had a bit of an uphill climb. We compromised on a poem a night, and at the the end we leafed back through the book to look at the artwork (illustrated by Rick Allen) in its entirety.

The poems were good. P noticed alliteration and we liked some of the false rhymes and the imagery often spun into delicious territory. The facts on opposite pages let P get his curmudgeonly feet dry of the poetry. But no single poem really called to me. The moon's progress across the pages delighted me, although I initially mistook it for the setting sun, which didn't make sense at all (east?). It's my favorite poetry book of the group so far, but I'm hoping for more. I think the illustrations set the mood more than the poems do, and the science facts add a lot. I see why it won a Newbery Honor.  B

I think the Amazon link benefits the Cybils group, but I doubt it will ever get clicked. I have a very private blog.