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December 29, 2006
Wing Nuts: Poetry Friday
Freedom vanishes
as the babysitter arrives…
kids are tied in nots
-from Wing Nuts: Screwy Haiku by Paul B. Janeczko and J. Patrick Lewis, illustrated by Tricia Tusa
This collection of Senryu would live almost as happy a life with the joke and riddle books as it will in the 811s with the rest of the poetry. I didn’t know a darn thing about Senryu before I picked up this book, and if I hadn’t read the flap, I wouldn’t have had a clue that this was what I was looking at. One would expect the editor of A Kick in the Head to think to include an explanatory note in the front or back of the book, but, thankfully, we have Wikipedia. And these poems are fun even if you don’t know what they are: funny, witty, and surprising like Haiku, but not nearly so Zen. Tricia Tusa’s illustrations (I was thinking, “I know these pictures, I know these pictures” until I remembered that she was the illustrator of Mem Fox’s The Magic Hat) are equal to the text. Her illustration for “Freedom Vanishes,” for example, includes several children tied in Twisteresque knots on a chair while a babysitter – complete with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses – reads from a long list of “do nots” that includes such items as “do not laugh.” Even when they aren’t much more than decoration, Tusa’s watercolors and wavy lines are appealing, and several of these poems had me laughing out loud at my desk. It's one of those books that makes me feel like I need to do something to convince more children to read poetry....
Posted by adrienne at December 29, 2006 12:10 AM
Comments
When you have time to kill sometime, check out this this guy's site. Especially the "Gallery of Regrettable Food" under the Institute of Official Cheer heading. But really everything here is really cool, you just need A LOT of time on your hands.
Posted by: chuck at December 29, 2006 11:46 AM