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Skywriting: Poems to Fly
By J. Patrick Lewis
Illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi
Creative Editions
$17.95
ISBN: 978-1-56846-203-5
Ages 4-8
On shelves September 1, 2010

We were promised jet packs. That’s what the future was supposed to hold for us. When you think of the future you may imagine things like flying cars or personalized jet packs. So in many ways the future just boils down to thinking up new ways to soar through the air. Humans get a real kick out of that sort of thing. Now I have never seen a jetpack make an appearance in a non-fiction title for children before and I CERTAINLY have never seen one in a non-fiction book of poetry. That’s what you get, though, when you read through the latest from J. Patrick Lewis and partner in crime Laszlo Kubinyi in their, Skywriting: Poems to Fly. Lewis has written out thirteen poems tracing the history of humanity’s obsession with flight. From Icarus to outer space, in essence. The result comes off as a kind of ode to not just our successes but our fantastic failures as well. Where there’s a jetpack, there’s a testament to our amazing/nutso imaginations.

Thirteen poems trace thirteen attempts at making it to the sky. Some were successful, as with the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon. Some were utter failures, like the multiplane of the Marquis d’Equeville. Some you’ve undoubtedly heard of, like the zeppelin. Others, like the kooky Piaseckivz-8P Airgeep or the French Equestrian Balloon are a little more obscure. And some, when all is said and done, never even left the minds of their creators (as with the beautiful Minerva that graces the cover of this book). The desire to lift oneself up unto the heavens above inspires both genius and madness in flight’s inventors. Tragedy and triumph too. Backmatter includes Endnotes and a Timeline.

Lewis allows himself to have a bit of fun with this particular book. For example, poems are not held to the same standards or rote forms. Instead, their formats pair well alongside their texts. So it is that the utterly ridiculous Ornithopter is described in a limerick, while the poem about The Wright Brothers gets a more respectful A/B/A/B format. As for the wordplay itself, how do you resist a line like, “metal Darth Vader / impersonator” to describe a sleek metal fighter jet?

One quibble I might have would be the fact that the Icarus story that starts us off is never identified as a myth in either the poem or the backmatter. One might assume that kids would be familiar with this myth and discount it as legend, but couched alongside all these true moments in history, I would have liked this to have been a little clearer.

Though it is by Kubinyi, this exact image does not appear in the book.

Though the Endnotes mention the tragic ends to some of these creations, the text of the poems themselves is consistently upbeat. You see the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin then, rather than its less fortunate cousin, the Hindenburg. Similarly the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-109 is seen at the height of its power. It’s only when you read the notes in the back that you hear about its own fate. Some readers may wish that a sober note could have been made in the poetry, alluding to these two incidents