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
First published in Great Britain, this beautifully designed large-format compendium offers 150 nursery rhymes from around the world. Though most are traditional English rhymes, other selections represent Anglo-American, African American, Australian, Chinese American, Chippewa, Irish, Jamaican, Latino, Scottish, and Welsh lore. Each of the 77 featured artists contributes a page or, more often, a double-page spread illustrating one or more rhymes. From the many well-known illustrators (Carle, Graham, Hughes, Ingpen, Kitamura, Klassen, Lynch, Pinkney, Raschka, Ray, Tan, Willems, Young) to the relatively unknown artists (three winners of a competition for art students), they use different approaches, styles, and media. On one spread, Alan Lee's large painting illustrates six short rhymes related to rain. On another, Marcia Williams' artwork for Old Mother Hubbard appears in 13 cartoon-style panels. A paragraph of information on each artist appears in the back matter, along with notes on sources and an index of first lines, a welcome addition to any large anthology of verse. This bountiful collection of colorfully illustrated nursery rhymes showcases both the verse and artists.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
More than 70 illustrators-Ashley Bryan, Eric Carle, Lucy Cousins, Shirley Hughes, Jon Klassen, Jerry Pinkney, and many more-interpret 150 nursery rhymes of various global origins. Cradle songs and rhymes familiar in the Western world, such as "Hush Little Baby" (depicted by Don Cadoret with a rabbit parent and child), intermingle with more obscure selections. A Tsimshian "laughing song" from the Pacific Northwest ("The little girl was born to gather wild roses") offers hope for a girl's future (it's accompanied by a luminous, rose-filled image by Tsimshian artist Bill Helin). The careful juxtaposition of the rhymes highlights both their diversity and cross-cultural commonalities: versions of "Little Miss Muffet" from England, America, Australia, and Jamaica have the girl being frightened by a spider, grasshopper, wombat, and "bredda Anancy." A rich and wonderfully varied addition to the bookshelf of nursery-rhyme collections. Ages 3-7. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Originally published in Great Britain, this collection includes 150 nursery rhymes-many of them familiar-from 23 countries and cultures, accompanied by color illustrations created by 76 artists, many well known, in a wide variety of styles and mediums: photos, soft watercolor scenes, hand-colored prints, comic strips and cartoons, collage, realistic paintings, and more. Several pages of rhymes are handwritten-some in childlike printing or cursive, others in flowing calligraphy. Jump rope rhymes, riddle rhymes, counting and clapping rhymes, finger games, songs, lullabies, and nonsense rhymes are included. In her two-page introduction, collector Hammill refers to nursery rhymes as "tiny masterpieces of verse" that "have outlasted their origins as street cries, folk songs, political satire, remnants of custom and proverb and have been polished into perfect form over time." Although all of the poems are in English, regional spelling has been used in some poems, such as the Jamaican verse, "Dis lickle pig go a markit,/Dis lickle pig tan a yaad." Appended are an "Index of First Lines," some brief information about each of the artists, and a listing of sources. Four "Contents" pages list poems and artists in order of appearance. The English versions of many familiar poems differ somewhat from the American wording. VERDICT This artistically appealing compilation will delight both children and adults and might be useful in elementary writing projects.-Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Public Library, OH (c) 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
This large volume collects 150 nursery rhymes, from the familiar Mother Goose to the more unfamiliar: an Inuit finger game, a Chinese American riddle, and an African American/Caribbean clapping song. Each double-page spread is illustrated by a different artist, which can make for some jarring page turns. But overall: handsome, original, and impressive in its inclusivity. (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
A sumptuous multicultural collection of nursery rhymes includes art by over 70 illustrators.The diversity of illustration styles and subjects coincides nicely with the diversity of rhymes, which refreshingly move beyond Anglophone origins. Hammill's skills as collector are especially sharp in juxtaposing cultural variants of rhymesfor example, a spread with the English Little Miss Muffet includes the Jamaican Lickle Muss Julie, the American Little Miss Tuckett and the Australian Little Miss Muffet, who gets frightened away by a pugnacious wombat rather than a spider. Also pleasing are inspired rhyme pairings. Isn't it fitting that naughty Georgie Porgie is on a page facing one devoted to the sometimes-horrid little girl with a curl? Or that the tongue twisters about Betty Botter and Peter Piper share a double-page spread? Or that Yankee Doodle and the grand old Duke of York face each other, too? It's also delightful to see rhymes including oft-omitted stanzas, including five in all for a not-so-little Bo Peep. Illustration highlights include: Emily Gravett's delicious, posterlike rendering of six-and-twenty mice alphabetically indulging in apple pie; Nina Crews' delectable photomontage illustrations for a variety of food-related rhymes; Robert Ingpen's gorgeous interpretation of "The lion and the unicorn"; and in a callback to his Caldecott Honor, Jerry Pinkney's interpretation of Brother Noah who built the ark. Never mind far away, keep this collection close by. (Poetry. 1-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
