Happy Constitution Day

Happy Constitution Day, everybody! Here it is, in all its glory. I have been trying, at various points in my life, to memorize the amendments, and slowly I'm making progress.

I was curious to see what a google search for "children's books Constitution Day" would produce. Mostly it seems to be the "celebrating America" type of book (see here, for example). It seems to me more to the point to compile lists of books that describe the need for the amendments, the struggle to enact them, and the consequences of their enactment. The amendments may perhaps be hard to memorize but they are oh so important to our lives, and what better way to learn about them than through fiction? (I say, as one who learns most easily that way).

Take, for instance, the story behind Amendment 26, the voting right set at 18 years, passed in 1971. Before 1971, you could drink and get drafted at 18, but not vote, now you can vote and get drafted, but not drink. Hmmm....But has this amendment made it into a ya book yet as an interesting (?) sub-plot?

Here are two amendments particularly rich in Story Potential:

Amendment 13 - Slavery Abolished. Ratified 12/6/1865 -- Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Amendment 19 - Women's Suffrage. Ratified 8/18/1920--the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

I thought it would be easy-peasy to go on line and find rich bibliographies of children's fiction (not picture books) on these two topics, but I was wrong. If they are out there, where are they? Sure, some places list two or three books, but is that it?

One of the more immediately relevant amendments for bloggers would be the First Amendment. A good book on this topic is Nothing but the Truth, by Avi, and here's a guide to discussion about it. There must be more books out there on freedom of speech, but they aren't coming into my head. Perhaps I should go look at the lists of banned and challenged books.

Anyway, I'm here celebrating Constitution Day by exercising my freedom of speech, blogging cheerfully away, with little real fear of government interference. Here are some voices from elsewhere in the world on that topic.

Library love

I love my library, with all its red brick ex-school building charm (at least, I work very hard to believe it is charm).

But here are some libraries that don't require any effort at all to love (unless you are a stark modernist, which is fine. We can all agree that less is sometimes more). Thanks for the link, Patrick!

TAKE A RIDE ON THE READING RAILROAD: Call for submissions for the September 2007 Carnival of Children's Literature

Take a Ride on the Reading Railroad here at Charlotte's Library when the September Carnival of Children's Literature comes to town!

If you'd like to hop on board, head on over to BlogCarnival and link up your posts.

The train is leaving on Friday, Sept. 21 at midnight eastern time, arriving at the beginning of the following week (unless there's a cow on the line). So get your links linked early and often!

If you haven't been part of a Blog Carnival before, do not be put off by feelings of shyness and uncertainty. It is very easy-- you just create a link to your favorite post from the past month or so, and slip it into a slot at the Blog Carnival website.

Here are some links to past carnivals: the very first one, at Here in the Bonny Glen (Melissa is still the carnival organizer--thanks, Melissa!) The most recent one, here at Po Moyemu--In my opinion, and the one before that at Saints and Spinners.

Thanks!

Clan Apis

Yesterday, I wept more over a book than I have for years. I was reading it out loud, and could barely choke out the words between sobs. It was a disservice to the book-- my children were so busy staring at me with half-alarmed amusement that they had little attention left for the poignant words and pictures.

What was this tear jerker? A graphic novelized version of the life of a honey bee, by Jay Hosler (2000, 158pp, which might seems like a lot for a reading out loud book, but it goes very quickly). "They" say it's for kids 9-12, but my four year old and I both liked it lots, so there you are.

We first meet Nyuki, the bee heroine of the story, when she is a little larva (cute and sassy), and follow her through the kind of intimidating things that happen when you're a bee--metamorphosis, leaving the hive for the first time, learning that the more you fly, the faster your wings wear out, and finally, dying (whah).

A truly excellent book--good science, good story, good pictures, good messages (things like: compost is good. Even though someone (a dung beetle) seems really strange and does things you think are yucky you can still be friends. Females are smart and brave). It was good reading practice too-- although I can read just fine when I'm not sniffing, my seven year old still doesn't read to himself--and a book like this gives him a chance to be one character while I do everyone else.

If you want to learn more about the book and the bees, visit its great website. Among other things, the website has a summary of the science topics covered in each section of the book. And it is science that one can trust--Jay Hosler is, after all, a neurobiologist who studies olfactory processing in honey bees.

A minor touch that we greatly enjoyed was an introductory page of pictures of bees drawn by children of all ages and skills -- from sausages with wings to real "nature drawings." I found it inspiring, and imagine that kids would too (mine, as usual, refused to comment in a useful or meaningful fashion when I asked them).

In short, if you have a kid who likes both Calivn and Hobbs and non-fiction, fact filled books, Clan Apis would be prefect. Or if you have a kid who has never tried a graphic novel, and who isn't wild about science, this book would be perfect.

For Poetry Friday: The Shell, by Ted Hughes

My older boy has an enlightened second grade teacher--instead of set assignments, they have homework choices each week, and one of these is always the memorization of a poem. Here's the poem all of us ended up memorizing this past week:

The Shell, by Ted Hughes

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.

You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.

This poem is anthologized in The Mermaid's Purse, by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Flora McDonnell (2000). I looked at it with some suspicion when my husband brought it home (associating Ted Hughes, in my ignorance, with suicide and darkness), but now I think it is a lovely book. Ostensibly it's for children 4-8, but to heck with that. I think that with poems such as this, the older you get the more meanings you can see.

In this case, we talked about what "the ghost of the sea" might mean. The children do not yet (I think) have much experience with regret, loss, and the cruel relentless inexorable erosion of the coast of life by the passage of years (ha ha), although they are aware of global warming and we are all glad we live on high ground. Nor do they truly realize that even though we live within 45 minutes of beaches we didn't go once this summer (although there's still tomorrow) and therefore they have Bad Parents (but I really hate sand in my shoes). So the ghost of the sea might not have as many layers of meaning for them as it does for me, but they will come. And in the meantime, the children still like the poem.

For more about Ted Hughes, here's a review of his collected poems from Kelly at Big A littl a.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is at here at Hipwritermama today!

A Year's Worth of Book Buying for my Library

The Annual Meeting of the Friends of my library was last night (I'm the president). In the last year, we raised over $4000, and spent over $4000. More than half of that we spent on books, and I would just like to say thanks to all the blog reviewers out there whose advice I took in buying 219 j and ya books for the library! Now all we need is more kids to come in and check them out. I'm also a little proud that we raised $1000 to send to Biloxi, to help rebuild the Katrina ravaged libraries there. A drop in the bucket, but still.

Once harmless pictures for children, now Bird of the Devil

In the 1970s, many of us British-educated types enjoyed the Ladybird series of non-fiction books, and in fact found them strangely compelling (I, for instance, still have my Ladybird Life of Nelson, which I read repeatedly as a child despite having little interest in a. Nelson b. Naval Warfare c. the early 19th century). I find even more strangely compelling the Ladybird inspired work of a modern artist, Edward Summerton, who has taken birds of prey pictures from the original books, and Paganized them, turning them into Demon Birds!

From this type of bird illustration:



to this:


The demonic bird on the right is called "Tree Creepy." Not something I would put up on the wall of my kid's room, perhaps, but charming in its own demonic way. The series of pictures has been published (in Denmark) as: "Bird [sic] of the Devil."
Here's the full article.

The New Policeman by Kate Thompson, 2005, 279 pages.

In the village of Kinara in Ireland, a young fiddle player, J.J. Liddy, asks his mother what she wants for her birthday. "Time," she answers, with good reason. All the time in Ireland is pouring into the land of Tir na N'og, and J.J. finds himself racing to find the leak before time runs out, discovering the truth about his family's past in the process, and learning some great new tunes.

The New Policeman is fun, fast-paced, and engaging. Thompson fleshes her plot out with music--J.J. comes from a family that has Irish traditional music at its heart, and each chapter ends with a tune transcribed by Thompson. As the wife of an Irish piper and sometime fiddle player myself (although I stopped when my oldest was born, because my playing made him scream), it was fun to see the tunes she chose, and fun to read her descriptions of the music with a critical eye ("anarchic" is not a word I would use to describe it. It has lots and lots of rules, both musical and social).

I enjoyed reading the book. I managed to find time to read it basically in one go on an evening alone with the kids while my husband was off playing at a local session (I sent them outside repeatedly, so it was a win-win). But it didn't move me emotionally. I didn't find a scrap of numinousness in it--that feeling in the best fantasy books when your eyes get all big and you perhaps feel a bit shivery. Tir na n'Og was mostly just a neat sunny place. When it was supposed to be a bit scary, Thompson basically says "this bit felt a bit scary." Nor was there any depth to the characters. J.J. is never more than your basic Nice Boy; everybody else is primarily a place holder.

Still, I will be reading the sequel, The Last of the High Kings, as soon as it makes it over here. Here's a glowing review of it from a UK reader.

Others apparently see things in The New Policeman that I don't--it won the Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Book of the Year, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2005, the Whitbread Book Award Children’s category 2005, the Children's Book of the Year in the Irish Book Awards in March 2006 and has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Note: No musical metaphors were used in the writing of this review. If musical metaphors are what you really want, read the reviews at Amazon. You will find lots.

Poetry Friday-- Bike Riding and its bloody consequences

My son got his first real sans-training wheels bike yesterday, a move inspired by the conversation he just had with his pediatrician:

Dr: So, can you ride a bike?
Son: "Well, my parents promised me a bike months ago but they still haven't gotten it for me."
Dr: "And do you brush your teeth yourself?"
Son: "Well, I'd like to, but there's no toothpaste in the tube, and my parents said they'd buy me some more but they haven't."

So now he has to learn to ride the thing (and to work harder at getting the toothpaste dregs out of the tube. There's plenty left).

For Poetry Friday, here are some poems celebrating the wonder and pain that is the Bike:

INJURY by Edel Wignell* (first published in School Magazine)

We raced our bikes and crashed.
I looked at the gash, and swooned.
Then my Dad discovered a bandage
And wound it round the wound.

MARY AND THE BIKE by Ed Blair, 1901 (Kansas Zephyrs, p. 143)

Mary had no little bike__
Like other kids at school
And so she stole the teacher's out,
Which was against the rule.
The teacher chased, but 'twas in vain,
For she flew like a fairy
Until the bike shied at a rock
And pied itself and Mary.**

And lastly, check out "Because I could not stop my bike" by Karen Jo Shapiro, in the book of that name, illustrated by Matt Faulkner (2005). It's a collection of very funny parodies of well known poems.



My favorite learning to ride a bike episode in children's fiction is Randy, in The Four Story Mistake, by Elizabeth Enright-- when she turned right, saw the long steep hill headed down through town, and forgot how to brake...

For more poems, you could check out The Art of Bicycling: a Treasury of Poems, Justin Daniel Belmont, ed., Breakaway Books, 2005.


*Edel Wignell is an Australian writer of chapter books, picture books, and poetry (as well as grown up books). I've never read any of her books, but browsing through the list on line I saw several that looked good (The Long Sticky Walk, in particular).

**I thought this one was interesting both because it seemed pretty early for it to be normal for a girl to be riding around on a bike, and because I liked the use of "pied" as a verb.


The POETRY FRIDAY roundup is at Semicolon today. Enjoy!

Language, Metaphor, and Children's Literature

There's a conference on children's literature coming up October 26 and 27th at Trinity College (University of Toronto)-- Particles of Narrative: Language, Metaphor, and Children's Literature.

This is the talk I'd like to hear:

Megan Whalen Turner: Reality in Suspension

If our fiction is a solution of reality dissolved in fantasy, what particles of reality are suspended there? Are these what Coleridge suggested in Biographia Literaria must be transferred “to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith”? Love, Loss, and Bad Judgment are embedded in our fiction, as well as historical events, snapshots of Greece, Oxford, The University of Waterloo, and things even more prosaic – what we had for dinner last night, noses, bilateral symmetry, and the assumptions of the day. The reader is the catalyst that acts in this solution. What precipitates then, when a reader reads?

Just in case the name Megan Whalen Turner rings no bells, she is the author of some of my favorite books ever -- The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia.

But perhaps more people will be eager to go to the Friday night keynote address:

PHILIP PULLMAN Poco a Poco: The Fundamental Particles of Narrative

Philip Pullman will look at the smallest possible units of story and, taking one such particle as an example, show what these microscopic events do in the context of a longer narrative, and how they acquire meaning, emotional power and metaphorical complexity.

Here's the link to the full program.

The Moon Princess

Dakota Blue Richards is having a busy year. After being Lyra in The Golden Compass movie, she's about to be Maria, in the movie version of A Little White Horse (The Moon Princess). I know that the question of whether an actor looks like the character as described in the book is not one that concerns the people who cast movies (Emma Watson is not my idea of Pauline, nor is she Noel Streatfeild's). But this picture of Dakota Blue Richards looks exactly like Maria as described in the book:

And I just learned that Colin Firth is going to be Sir Benjamin -sounds good. The Official site about the movie doesn't confirm this, however.

Here's an earlier post I wrote about the Little White Horse/Moon Princess. I am more optimistic now.

Max's Words

Max's Words, by Kate Banks, illustrated by Boris Kulikov, 2006, 32 pages,
ages 4-8.

Our librarian flung this book at our heads a few days ago. It was a happy choice (the book, not our heads). Not only did we enjoy reading it, it inspired an hour of "literacy activities" that made me feel like a Good Parent.

The plot is simple--Max has two brothers, one an avid philatelist, the other an equally avid numismatist. But will they give Max a single stamp or coin? No. So Max decides to start his own collection--of words. He cuts them out of newspapers and magazines, and copies them from the dictionary (it was scary for a minute there. I thought he was going to cut up the book). Soon he has heaps and heaps of words, in pile after pile.

Words are pretty neat things (even banal, overused ones). Words that tell stories are especially nice (a word I will defiantly continue to use, even though my fourth grade teacher told me not too. Darn it). Max begins to use his words together, and the fun really begins as they turn into Stories.

The words are not just any old words, but Illustrated, Colorful, Alive words that are rapidly evolving into concrete poetry. "Baseball" is bat shaped, "hungry" is bitten, "alligator" and "crocodile" have spiky teeth. And when the words make stories, clever and colorful illustrations show how they fit together.

The words are so much fun, in fact, that the two older brothers want their share. They start to make their own story, and the (mild) tension builds--will they get the words together fast enough to kill the worm (bad older brothers) or will Max be able to foil them with a quick arrangement of his own words, and save it?*

The value of words in a more pragmatic sense is underlined at the end, when Max swaps piles of words for a coin and a stamp (which he can perhaps use to send his first ms. off with).

In short, this was a fun, snappy book. But wait, there's more. The real value of this book, I think, is that it makes kids (and me too) want to write words on pieces of paper, cut them up, and make stories and nonsense and poems with them. This is what we did last night--about an hour of all four of us on the living room floor, surrounded by words, and some punctuation. My little boy slept with the question mark and the exclamation mark, and took them to school today. The last I saw of them they were on the Sharing Chair, a tad doubtful, but very excited.

*the worm lives.

PS: My personal favorite book about the power of words is Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy Sayers. My favorite book in which words come alive is Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson.

The Cooley's Anemia Foundation Storybook

I have a book to pass on, if anyone wants it. It's a collection of fairy tales by Craig Butler, illustrated by Tess Elliott, designed specifically for children with the genetic blood disorder Cooley's anemia (aka thalassemia). Some of the stories are engaging, some pedestrian, and there are moments of great honesty, like this poem, Doctor Day:

I have to go to the doctor today
Even though the sun is shining
And I'd much rather play.
Please don't say I'm whining
Or acting "that way."
I know I must go to the doctor today.
But that doesn't mean I like it - okay?

The book, says the author in his letter that accompanied the book, "was written to help impart important lessons..." and as a result there is more than a touch of pedantic-ness to them. I dunno about the premise--I was never a sick child, but I think I would have chosen Escapism rather than Lessons. Still, perhaps for the parent of a sick child it is comforting to think that you are reading words to your child that will help.

This book was self-published in 2007 by the Cooley's Anemia Foundation. If anyone wants this copy, let me know.

Mollie Hunter -- The Sound of Chariots and Hold On To Love

Mollie Hunter is one of Scotland's most distinguished children's writers. She's perhaps best known for her historical fiction--she won the 1974 Carnegie Medal for The Stronghold, about Iron Age Scotland, and her story about Mary Queen of Scots, You Never Knew Her as I Did, is most excellent. Others of her books are fantasies, based on Scottish legends (A Stranger Came Ashore, The Mermaid Summer, and many others). But my favorite Mollie Hunter books are two that are simply "YA for girls," in that they deal with the difficult growing up of a girl-- The Sound of Chariots (1972) and Hold on to Love (1983).*

Bridie McShane is the fourth daughter of loving but impoverished parents in a village near Edinburgh. Her father is a survivor of WWI, a man of great intellect, wit, and passion for social justice; her mother is a gentle, Christian foil for him, although no less intelligent and passionate. Bridie is her father's favorite, her mind leaping to follow his ideas ("Christ was a Revolutionary!"). She is also a writer, fighting with a teacher who wants to make her words conform--the teacher changes Bridie's "green broken glass" to "broken green glass," and the magic is lost. In the second book, she has left school and gone to work in Edinburgh, living with her rigid and old fashioned grandparents, but still finding space to grow up, and (yes, I like this sort of thing) finding a nice boy to fall in love with, as WW II looms on the horizon.

The Sound of Chariots takes its title from Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress" -- "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Because halfway through this book, Bridie's father dies, and the fact of her own on coming death hits her with an inevitability that colors her perception of life and her development as a writer. The resonance of Bridie's emotions makes this book much stronger and more original than its sequel, which has, after all, a plot that many of us may have seen before.

In the 1970s American libraries bought a lot of really good UK children's book's, which they have been busy discarding these past few years. So The Sound of Chariots might not still be on the shelves of your local library, but there are lots of cheap ex library copies for sale. The 1980s seem to have been a period of retrenchment in library buying--there don't seem to have been nearly as many UK books bought (anyone else think this?). So Hold on To Love is slightly harder to find.

I tried to find an image of the cover of the edition I had, but there aren't any on line. Here are the early hardback and paperback covers, in all their beauty (not--it's a wonder anyone ever read the poor book at all):


*These books are set in The Past --1920s and 1930s, but don't feel like historical fiction. In my mind, Historical Fiction seems to equate with longer skirts--pre WWI. By the 1920s, the long skirts aren't there to get in the way of my identifying strongly with the central character, and so I can suspend my present in favor of the author's past. However, books set in the same WWI to WWII past, about Historical Events etc, and less about a person to whom I can strongly relate, I would be much happier to pigeon hole in the Historical Fiction category.

For Poetry Friday --At The Seaside

I went to the seaside today, for work--part of my job is looking after shipwrecks. They are not as needy as my Dear Children, but still need care and attention. I can't think of any nice snappy shipwreck poems, and google didn't give me anything, but I did find this rather lovely poem by Stevenson that I'd never heard before:

At the Seaside

~Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Mentor Texts today. Go to the next post, and you also get the Second Picture Book Carnival. Enjoy!

And speaking of carnivals, the August Carnival of Children's Literature is up at Po Moyemu-In My Opinion. and it looks great!

The September Carnival will be hosted by me--more to come.

Harder than a Literary Weed Quiz

If you thought my weed quiz last Thursday was hard, check out this quiz from the London Times--the winner gets 10,000 pounds worth of free books, but it's not going to be me.

I don't have time to give the answers to the weed quiz today as promised, but I will do so eventually...

News from Across the Pond

Potted Potter The Reduced Shakespeare company apparently managed to get all seven Harry Potter books performed in under an hour...I knew all she needed was good editor.

Of particular interest to fans of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books (think Roxeboxen for older readers, but with sailboats and pirates and explorers in the Lake District of England instead of desert)--Fidra Books is republishing The Far Distant Oxus by Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull (ponies and ancient Persia on the moors of Devon). Pamela and Katharine co-wrote their book in their teens, and sent it off to Ransome, whom they admired greatly. He in turn took it his publisher, and there you go. I much prefer the Swallows and Amazons books, but The Far Distant Oxus has its charms, especially for those who like pony books.

A different, more crime-fightingly exciting series was The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton. I read them all (and there are many of them), and am still peeved that my mother saw fit to dispose of them when I was 11. From The Times, August 28, 2007, comes this eyebrow-raising news:

"For two decades they patrolled the English seaside during school holidays, instilling fear into smugglers, kidnappers and spies, but in 1963 the Famous Five had their final adventure.

The fates of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy, arguably the most formidable upper middle class crime-fighting squad assembled, have been open to speculation ever since.

But now the mystery is at last about to be laid to rest with a new television series. The characters are scheduled to return to the screen as middle-aged men and women in a drama authorised by Enid Blyton’s estate."

It reminds me of an article that came out in the late 70s in which a middle aged Nancy Drew is interviewed. I remember my parents reading it with great enjoyment--"Oh no, not tea," says Nancy at one point. "Tea stains my teeth."

Extreme Animals--The Toughest Creatures on Earth

Extreme Animals: The Toughest Creatures on Earth, by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Neal Layton (2006) is one of the best kid's non-fiction books I've ever read. Heck, even thought it's ostensibly a kid's book, this 61 page fact-filled, well-written, amusingly illustrated book would make a great present for the curious adult.

"We humans are such a bunch of wimps!" the book begins. "We can't stand the cold, we can't stand the heat, we can't live without food, or water, and just a few minutes without air is enough to finish us off." But there are creatures out there much, much tougher--an amazing assortment of living things who survive incredibly hostile environments. Did you know, for example, that polar bear fur is so marvellously effective at keeping warm air in that a heat-seeking mission to find the bears only glimpsed the occasional nose? Or that if you put a sponge in a blender, and then pour the glop back in the ocean, it can reassemble itself back into a living creature?

The explanations for such wondrous phenomena are clear and to the point, with helpful, and funny, illustrations that underline and clarify. Each section is one or two rather densely written pages long, sufficient for explanation, while not to long to be overwhelming. The vocabulary tends toward the accessible Anglo-Saxon, but includes Latinate sciencey words (dormancy, hibernation, etc.) as appropriate, doing the reader the compliment of not explaining them except in a glossary at the back. Despite the relative simplicity of the words, it's not an "Early Reader" in the strict sense, but it makes a great read aloud for younger kids. My 7 year old, 4 year old, their grandmother and I all loved this book.

The winner of the Toughest Creature on Earth competition, by the way, is the tardigrade. They've been heated to 300 F, frozen to -459, been put under pressure six times greater than that at the bottom of the sea, and into pressureless vacuums, they've been zapped with lethal doses of x-rays and poisoned with chemicals. And still they live...

Mystery Manor

I have never read, nor had I even heard of, Mystery Manor, a 1939 children's novel by Mary Evelyn Atkinson, despite my interest in English children's books of this period. Thanks to this post at Oz and Ends, I will look for it next time I'm in England. Very funny!

This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort

This Place I know: Poems of Comfort Edited by Georgia Heard, with 18 illustrations by "renowned picture book artists." (2002)

I picked up, more or less at random, this anthology of poems--the idea of comforting poems appealed during this late August time of endings and transitions (I had my first anxiety dream about starting 2nd grade last night). These poems were gathered with a rather more powerful purpose, however--Georgia Heard chose them for the New York City children who saw the World Trade Center fall. But whether the anxiousness-es or griefs are large or small, the poems in this book can provide a starting place for talk, or simply be a comfort in themselves. These are, incidentally, secular poems; the comfort they offer comes from images of hope and happiness, nature and the love of other people.

All anthologies are someone else's choices (unless you happen to be the editor); some choices are agreeable, some are wonderful surprises, and others fail to move. One poem, new to me, which I loved was The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry. I can't quote the whole thing here because of copyright, but here it is with the middle removed:

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and children's lives may be...
...I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It is perhaps not surprising that this was my favorite, because of the parental element. Other lovely poems include "Strengthen the Things that Remain" by Nancy Wood, "Dreams," by Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the thing with feathers."

Then 18 magnificent illustrators are a bit of a grab bag. I love William Steig's children's books, but the boy in his picture here is the scary type from his New Yorker cartoons. Kevin Hawkes, however, has a lovely picture to go with the Wendall Berry poem.

But who could not like

Trouble, fly
out of our house.
We left the window
open for you.

("Trouble, Fly" by Susan Marie Swanson).

The Poetry Friday Roundup is over at The Book Mine Set today! Enjoy.