Hooray!  Hooray!  Poetry is in its ascendance again.  How do I know? Three fabulous poetry books (for three different age groups) have come across my desk in the last few weeks, and I’ve seen at least two articles on children’s poetry in the literary journals I read.  This is good news, not only for people who love poetry but for children too.

Poetry is one of the best ways of attuning children’s ear to the rhythm and rhymes of a language.  If children can hear, understand and appreciate the music of a language it will help them no end as they learn how to read and write.  Here are three vastly different books of poetry that I highly recommend.

Lovers of Honey Sandwiches (the Elizabeth Honey type) will love Elizabeth Honey’s new collection of rhymes, The Moon in the Man.  She describes it as a ‘bouncing-on-the-knee, joining-in, make-‘em laugh, happy times book of rhymes’ – and it is exactly that.  Each page, with it’s bold coloured background and accompanying illustration, brings to life a different poem.  The poems deal with day to day events that pre-schoolers, and their parents, may be encountering such as making and eating ‘Mud soup’, learning how to count with the ‘Number Rumba’ or jumping up and down doing the ‘Bubble Wrap Rap’.  Many of the poems are action rhymes and Honey has drawn explanatory diagrams to show you what your fingers should be doing in time to the words.  If you can’t get the hang of these then you can see Honey performing them if you go to www.allenandunwin.com/teaching/moonintheman.asp.

The strength of this collection is that is takes children from seemingly simple rhymes to poems which use more sophisticated literary devices such as symbolism and metaphor.  The more complex poems are often explained through the accompanying illustration.  For this reason it is a fantastic way to introduce young children to the way poems work as well as the way they sound.  And you’ll be able to do all this without the children even knowing they’re learning because they will be having so much fun.  I imagine this is a book we will be seeing a lot of in next year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia Early Childhood category.  Elizabeth Honey is a frequent visitor to Central Victoria and you’ll even find a reference to Bendigo in one of the rhymes.

Paul B. Janeczko, a poet and teacher and Chris Raschka, a noted American illustrator have combined to produce, one of the most beautifully designed poetry books I’ve seen for a long while.  The satin paper pages are more like card, and each page is almost asking to be torn out and framed because the illustrations are such cleverly executed collages of colour, pattern, texture and text.  Kids you read this to will be itching to have a go at creating these types of poems. A Poke in the I is a collection of concrete poems which the editor, explains are ‘a lot more playful than everyday poems’ because they are as much to do with the placement of the words and the fonts used as with the actual words of the poem. For instance the poem ‘STOWAWAY’by Robert Carola is a brilliant example of a one word poem …, and John Hegley’s

I

NEED

CONTACT

LENSES

LIKE I NEED A POKE IN THE EYE

will bring a smile to your face because of it’s clever visual reference to eye charts. Raschka’s description of concrete poetry on the dust jacket is so poetic it could easily have made it into the main body of the book: ‘Concrete poetry is the yoga of words.  Like feeling your breath and your bones, you begin to notice what words and sentences actually look like.’ If you’re looking for a book to hook children, especially boys, into poetry then this is the book for you. 

And finally back to Bendigo where I have left the best until last.  Did you know we have a world renowned literary poet living in our midst?  Lorraine Marwood’s adult and children’s literary poems have been widely published, in literary magazines and journals, both here and overseas.  She also has her own collection of adult literary poems in print.  With such a list of work behind her it is no wonder that Australia’s most prestigious poetry publishing house, Five Islands Press, has chosen to publish a collection of her children’s literary poetry, illustrated by Tamara Marwood (another local artist) and Joanne McNamara.

Marwood is a great believer in the importance of children being exposed to literary poetry from an early age.  She has nothing against the more popular forms of poetry but feels that many children are not given the chance to discover literary poetry because it is considered too sophisticated, too obscure, or too boring. The publication of Redback Mansion will do much to help primary and lower secondary students discover the magic of a well crafted literary poem.  It is a deliberately well-priced soft cover collection designed to be affordable for any home or school library.

Redback Mansion showcases Marwood’s distinct poetic voice and the illustrations of two talented young artists, Joanne McNamara and Tamara Marwood.   The rural flavour will appeal to country and city kids alike. Some of the more humorous poems are the ones that work best and she shows her talent at helping us look at the familiar in new ways.  For me Marwood has two strengths that mark her out from other writers.  The first is she does not write for the sake of writing which means that none of her work sounds empty or contrived.  Her second strength is that she doesn’t rely on one style or device to tell her stories.  Each poem, even if it is about a similar topic will be told quite differently – she doesn’t write formulaic poetry.  For me, a distinctive poem is one where a line or concept connects the reader with something about life they know to be true, so that long after the poem and its author are forgotten the line still sticks.  I think readers will find many such lines and concepts in this new collection.  And I think many teachers and students will be pleasantly surprised that they can not only understand literary poetry, but enjoy it too.  Highly recommended.

Review by Sarah Mayor Cox

© 2002 Sarah Mayor Cox