Review by New York Times Review
POEMS DON'T NECESSARILY need pictures, nor pictures poems. But children - for whom magic is real and logic over-rated - love and need both. In three handsome new poetry collections for children, word and image energize and illuminate each other, becoming journeys for the eye and ear. The word "nursery" in the title "Over the Hills and Far Away: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes" implies that these poems are for the very youngest children, but my 8-year-old daughter read this book for a long time, saying, "I like that the poems come from all over the world." Because each of the book's 77 illustrators gets a two-page spread featuring one to three poems, to turn a page is to shift worlds. Tongue-twisters ("Betty Botter") segue to spirituals ("Who built the ark?/Noah, Noah") to Mother Goose ("Little Boy Blue") to this luminous tercet, accompanied by a desert sunset, from the Southwestern indigenous tribe Tohono O'odham: How shall I begin my song In the blue night that is settling? I will sit here and begin my song. The illustrations in this book make bridges, helping us, say, to see similarities and differences in animal poems with wordplay from Australia and America. Trinidadian clapping rhyme verses ("Mosquito one, / Mosquito two, / Mosquito jump in de callaloo") are pasted into a vivid paper collage by Petrina Wright. John Lawrence's woodcuts of London townspeople seem perfect for the old English bell poem: "When will you pay me?/Say the bells of Old Bailey./When I grow rich, / Say the bells of Shoreditch." Pamela Zagarenski's Chagall-like village features a tiny elephant, a child asleep on a hillside and a giant man blowing cloud-swirls across a monumental moon. The untitled American lyric it accompanies is casually riveting: Bed is too small for my tiredness. Give me a hilltop with trees; Tuck a cloud up under my chin. Lord, blow out the moon - please. That contains both mystery and comfort, which might be key to what makes good kids' poetry good. Diversity helps, too. My daughter and I discovered, reading this book, that the lullaby I still sing her ("All the pretty little horses") is African-American in origin. Holly Sterling's illustration shows a burly brown man cradling a baby girl as dream horses run through a night sky. Wonderful, but not common, to find dads in a book of children's poems. JooHee Yoon's "Beastly Verse" is very much about its pictures. Three-color illustrations of critters fill up page after intense page, cheerily aggressive, goofy, beastly-friendly. Yoon's poem selection is economical, intelligent, even hip. Laura Richards's kid-anthology standard "Eletelephony" ("Once there was an elephant,/Who tried to use the telephant -/No! no! I mean an elephone/Who tried to use the telephone -") is here. So, naturally, is Blake's sublime "The Tyger" (modernized to "The Tiger": Why?), and Ogden Nash: The Eel I don't mind eels Except as meals. And the way they feels. "Beastly Verse" also contains surprises, like Robert Desnos's "The Pelican," involving pelican eggs and omelets, and D.H. Lawrence's "Humming-bird," which begins I can imagine, in some otherworld Primeval-dumb, far back In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed, Humming-birds raced down the avenues. That's characteristic Lawrence - sprawling, neurotically alive. Kids appreciate the bizarre and off-kilter, and are too often denied it when grown-ups edit for positive messages and sweetness. Hooray for Yoon for countering that. Within the book's visual continuity, Yoon's selections change mood: "Sunlight, moonlight,/Twilight, starlight -/Gloaming at the close of day," begins Walter de la Mare's "Dream Song," which goes on to talk of "an owl calling" and "lions roaring,/Their wrath pouring. . . ." I don't particularly want to read poems in sans-serif type in bright colors or white letters, never in black, but my daughter thought that was silly of me. Certainly it makes visual sense that in "Dream Song," "Elf-light, batlight,/Touchwood-light and toad-light. . . ." emerge golden from the dark forest Yoon has painted behind the words. Paul B. Janeczko's excellent selections for "The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in 50 Objects" are mainly grown-up poems that children will like for their emotional authenticity, verbal texture, accessibility and figurative magic. Chris Raschka's watercolor-and-ink renderings are attractively impressionistic: "gray and batter'd ship" for Walt Whitman's "The Dismantled Ship"; ethereal scarecrow for Basho's "Midnight frost -/I'd borrow/the scarecrow's shirt"; wheelbarrow and puffy white chicken for William Carlos Williams. Organized chronologically from the early Middle Ages to the contemporary Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, the book interprets the word "object" broadly. The inanimate includes Neruda's stamp album, Sandburg's lackadaisically aphoristic "Boxes and Bags," Dickinson's railway train that her speaker likes to see "lap the miles." Living objects include Sylvia Plath's "Mushrooms" ("Overnight, very/Whitely, discreetly"), Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "The Cat" (who "sees ghosts in motes of air") and Tennyson's "The Eagle," which my in-house predator-lover liked especially for the metaphors: The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. It may be of moral importance for children to have magic in their lives; metaphor is one way for them to experience that. In "The Death of the Hat," objects can be cosmic, and political, like Langston Hughes's "Stars": "O, sweep of stars over Harlem streets, . . . / Reach up your hand, dark boy, and take a star." Janeczko doesn't shy from serious matter. There's war and pastoral richness in the medieval Arab-Andalusian poet Ibn Iyad's "Grainfield": Look at the ripe wheat bending before the wind like squadrons of horsemen fleeing in defeat, bleeding from the wounds of the poppies. Janeczko knows that poetry for kids, as for adults, needn't be simplistic, that in writing about objects, poets write about people. In the title poem, Billy Collins describes how "the day war was declared/ everyone in the street was wearing a hat" and remembers a father coming home from work in a hat with the evening paper. Some poems in this book, like Collins's, don't exclude difficult emotions - but deliver them gently: And now my father, after a life of work, wears a hat of earth, and on top of that, a lighter one of cloud and sky - a hat of wind. DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 12, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Using a vintage spot-color printing technique, which employs three primary-color inks that overlap to create a broad spectrum of hues, Yoon brings a series of classic animal poems to life with wild, vibrant illustrations ranging from uproarious to serene. Laura E. Richards' Eletelephony appears next to a neat, bright, and sunny living room, but, echoing the jumbled syllables in the poem, a gatefold page opens to reveal a massive, blueish-purple elephant chaotically turning over furniture as it answers the phone. Yoon illuminates Walter de la Mare's Dream Song, meanwhile, with a warm, paint-splattered sunset flanked by a shadowy forest and a saucer-eyed owl. Though a few of the poems, such as William Cowper's The Snail, might be a challenge for some kids, the majority of selections are short, a little bit jokey, and a lot of fun to read out loud. The main attraction, of course, is Yoon's stunning, exuberant artwork. The riot of bright tones, abstract shapes, and tangled textures artfully combines to reveal stylized figures and lush backgrounds that both beautifully evoke the spirit of the verses and comically illustrate the sillier selections. Poetry classes would be well served by this superior piece of bookmaking.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her U.S children's book debut, Yoon creates a monstrous menagerie to accompany 16 poems about animals real and imagined. Her bold, vintage-looking prints use only three colors-a lurid yellow, bright pink, and creamy teal-that overlap to create secondary shades. The sharply contrasting colors make the grinning, grimacing, snarling creatures seem to pulse with electricity, and foldout pages enhance the sense of movement. Opening a large flap turns D.H. Lawrence's "Humming-Bird" into a fearsome prehistoric beast with pointed teeth and a snaking tongue: "In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation./ I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak." Other poems include Ogden Nash's "The Eel," William Blake's "The Tiger," and Palmer Brown's 'The Spangled Pandemonium," a long-tailed animal that goes missing from the zoo. A fierce and fresh bestiary. Ages 4-8. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 4-Yoon's bold imagination is evidenced by her illustrations of these 16 animal-related poems by an eclectic group of writers including Lewis Carroll, D.H. Lawrence, and surrealist Robert Desnos. The verses vary from the nonsensical, such as Laura E. Richards's "Eletelephony," to the sublime, such as Walter de la Mare's "Dream Song." By combining printmaking, drawing, and digital techniques and relying upon three Pantone colors, Yoon has created a work of art, full of vibrant colors, striking patterns, and playful layouts. To capture William Blake's "The Tiger," for instance, Yoon uses a gatefold that reveals part of the tiger amid a background of wild forest ferns on each page, with the color scheme moving from greens to yellows, until the tiger's head emerges, ablaze like the sun. VERDICT An excellent, innovative approach to poetry.-Teresa Pfeifer, The Springfield Renaissance School, Springfield, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Flashily illustrated anthologies of poems about animals are many, and while this is one of those, have a look. For her sixteen selections, Yoon has gone mostly to the usual suspects (Nash, Blake, Belloc, etc.) most obvious poems (The Eel, The Tiger, The Yak); but you wouldnt be buying this book for the poems but for the pictures. Bellocs yak, for example, is a big red scribbly beast planted firmly in a snowy mountain landscape; a turn of the page shows that same picture writ small, as a little girl points out to her father where the Yak can be got. The tiger, its stripes sinuously patterned and blending with the fronds and shadows of the forests of the night, gets a surprise gatefold spread to fully convey its mystery and majesty. (Another gatefold wittily reveals the elephant in the room for Laura E. Richardss Eletelephony.) The book is big and square and sturdy, with thick off-white paper doing its best to subdue the crazy embellishment Yoon pours onto each animal and scene via overlays of three primary colors. But as busy as the pictures are, the artist knows to pay attention to the words, making sure that Carolyn Wellss happy hyena gets both the concertina and verbena promised by the poem. roger sutton Nonfiction(c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Using just three impossibly bright colors, printmaker Yoon illustrates a collection of animal-themed poems of varying familiarity. There's a nostalgic feel to the collection, as many poems date from the 19th centuryWilliam Blake's "The Tiger," Christina Rossetti's "Caterpillar," and Lewis Carroll's "The Crocodile" among themand none dates later than the mid-20th century. For all that they may be old, however, the poems have a real child friendliness, from the light verse of Ogden Nash ("The Eel") and Hilaire Belloc ("The Yak") to the weightier stanzas of D.H. Lawrence ("Humming-bird") and Walter de la Mare ("Dream Song"). If the poetry delights, the prints dazzle. Layering cyan, magenta, and yellowand eschewing blackYoon produces crowded, eye-popping images that will draw children's attention. There's a studied, childlike crudeness to her stylings, full of scribbly lines and overlap, that yields great energy. Carolyn Wells' "Happy Hyena," its bright pink head wildly out of proportion to its body, wears a green jacket and a yellow waistcoat, playing the concertina as it walks through town. The book's design offers further surprises. A pink telephone jangles imperiously in a seemingly empty room in Laura Richards' "Eletelephony," but a gatefold opens to show an enormous teal-and-purple elephant hopelessly entangled in the telephone's cord. Gleefully distinctive stylings, fluorescent colors, and beautiful bookmaking should make an eager new audience for these old poems. (Picture book/poetry. 4-10) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
