Tender to tongue-in-cheek, a broad showcase for a versatile writer.
A compact gathering of new verse on diverse topics, from a British poet born in Jamaica.
Within thematic groupings, Bloom writes of children newly born or bored (“Family and Friends”), of erupting volcanoes (“Our World”), of extinct animals (“Animals”), and of dreams (“Unbelievable?”). In the family section, a child muses on her parents, who are apparently at odds: “They say that they’ll always / Love me forever. / I only wish / They could love me together.” Another section, titled “Fun With Forms,” offers samples of an elfje and of skeltonic verse among more familiar constructions—but, alas, there is no explication of these. Though her casual approach to rhyming and metrics does result in some stumbles (“Once I held inside my palms / the curviness of a bow, / and listened in the cornfield / to the sadness of a scarecrow”), the selections offer a range of moods and some choice wordplay to boot, like this from “Praying Mantis”: “Before a meal, what it will say / Is not ‘Bless this food’ but ‘Let us prey’.” The child on the cover and many of the human figures in the illustrations that accompany nearly every poem are people of color. Outside of anthologies, very little of the veteran poet’s work has made it to the States, so count this for most U.S. readers an unjustly tardy introduction.
Tender to tongue-in-cheek, a broad showcase for a versatile writer. (Poetry. 8-11)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-91307-467-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Otter-Barry
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Overall, a thick collection of humorous verse that might have been funnier with thinner ambitions.
Gifted poet and illustrator Florian (Poem Runs: Baseball Poems, 2012, etc.) here presents a chunky collection of drawings and brief poems on a host of silly subjects.
Posited as a superstore of verse on assorted topics children care about—school, family, animals, food and the like—one also can’t help thinking this “depot” represents a midway point for a number of poems that haven’t quite reached their creative destinations. To be truly effective, light or nonsensical verse should be as tight in its poetic construction as it is loosely suggestive in metaphorical associations, and a number of the works assembled here simply read as not fully cooked. The volume’s more successful poems tend to employ wordplay to elicit a chuckle or illustrate delightfully nonsensical truisms about language, as in “Insect Asides”: “A dragonfly is not a fly. / It’s not a dragon either. / No butter on a butterfly, / And bees cannot spell neither.” Likewise, when paired well, Florian’s free-form pen-and-ink drawings enhance the whimsical nature of the fanciful scenes depicted. In “Pets,” a creepy drawing of a girl with hairy spiders crawling all over her face offers a convincing explanation for the accompanying poem’s punch line: “Bruce has ten pet roosters. / Ben has ten pet hens. / Fran has ten tarantulas, / But not too many friends.”
Overall, a thick collection of humorous verse that might have been funnier with thinner ambitions. (Poetry. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8037-4042-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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