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June 15, 2007
Today and Today: Poetry Friday
Calm, indifferent
As if nothing’s transpired –
The goose, the willow
-from Today and Today by Issa, illustrated by G. Brian Karas.
G. Brian Karas has been illustrating books for a long time (my library system’s catalog claims that the first book he illustrated was Vicki Cobb’s The Scoop on the Ice Cream in 1985, but our catalog has been known to perpetuate vicious rumors and lies), but he’s not one of those illustrators people talk about. I’ve been noticing his work more since he illustrated Oh No, Gotta Go! by Susan Middleton Elya in 2003, which is a book that is witty and funny and on the story shelf in my office. I like his work in the High-Rise Private Eyes series by Cynthia Rylant (which is so sadly underappreciated), Barfburger Baby, I Was Here First! By Paula Danziger, and Are You Going to Be Good? by Cari Best. He’s worked on a lot of funny books. I like funny books, and, in the books I’ve read at any rate, his art has proven a nice compliment to the humor.
I think I got the idea to read 2007’s Today and Today from one of Susan’s excellent Poetry Friday posts over at Chicken Spaghetti, and I suspect the book is going to make my list of 2007’s best. Here, Karas has selected and illustrated eighteen haiku by 18th Century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. Karas moves seasonally from spring to another spring. Issa’s poems explore moments, and Karas uses his illustrations to turn these moments into a story. The story begins with joy – a family flying kites in a green world full of blooms. The text moves into the heat of summer, one extraordinary illustration in earth tones looking at a boy in his room through the window screen, another an homage to VanGogh’s The Starry Night. Autumn arrives with the grandfather, present here and there previously, napping in his chair. Then the reader turns the page to find an illustration of the grandfather’s chair, empty. A couple pages into winter, we see the story’s children watching a goose from the window of a hospital (accompanied by the poem above). On the next, they are with their parents in a spare, flat, snowy cemetery. Grandparents dying is a common enough theme in children’s literature, almost to the point of cliché, but this death is a shock. Karas leaves hints in his pictures throughout, but the death feels as sudden as it does in life – expected and unexpected at once. This is surprisingly effective serious work from an illustrator I associate with humor. Karas ends with joy, though, and spring’s hopeful blossoms back again. As Karas says in his note on the verso of the title page, “It is ordinary, extraordinary moments like these, strung together, that make up our lives.” This ordinary, extraordinary book is worth repeated readings.
[Editor's Notes: Speaking of Susan, she has a great article on Poetry Friday in the kidlitosphere over at poetryfoundation.org -- bravo, Susan! Today's roundup is over at The Simple and the Ordinary.]
Posted by adrienne at June 15, 2007 08:17 AM