Hello and welcome to this week’s Poetry Friday. I will update this post with your posts throughout the day – in the meantime, please leave your links in the Comments below.
In honor of the mosaic of poetry that will make up the wonderful whole as created each week for Poetry Friday, I thought I’d highlight Jorge Luján’s gorgeous poem-turned-picture-book Sky Blue Accident/Accidente Celeste - beautifully translated by Elisa Amado and illustrated by Piet Grobler (Groundwood Books, 2007) (and the “beautifully” refers to both the translation and the illustrations, by the way).
Before the poem starts, two double-page spreads show a small boy cycling to school, at first concentrating hard on the task in hand and then being distracted by a bird in the sky… And so:
Una mañana de brumas
me tropecé con el cielo
y a los pedazos caídos
los escondí e mi bolsillo.
Once on a misty morning
I crashed into the sky,
Then hid its broken pieces
In my pocket.
What follows is a joyous flight of imagination, as the child tries to show the pieces of sky to his teacher; and then all the children try and repair the hole in the sky by painting a new one, to get things back to normal (for without a complete sky “Lost clouds stumbled around/bumbling into corners,” – isn’t that a beautiful image? – and the moon is also behaving oddly…). The boy then uses the fragments of the “real” sky to fill in the last remaining gaps.
The poem is a delight and Piet Grobler’s gorgeous illustrations are very clever as well as a joy to the eye – for they combine the flight of imagination in the poem (including a teacher who grows wings and flies out the window) with a school setting that has the boy drawing on his lined exercise paper; and there are also certain visual motifs that the reader catches up with eventually. You can see some pages from the Spanish edition on Jorge’s website.
So now we will see what kind of sky Poetry Friday brings us this week. Will it be cloudy, gray or blue – or maybe sparkly or rosy or velvet? I can’t wait to find out… and if you have a moment on your hands while you’re here wondering too, do pause and watch this video of Jorge’s poem Tarde de Invierno/Winter Afternoon, illustrated my Mandana Sadat, and like Sky Blue Accident, beautifully translated by Elisa Amado and published by Groundwood Books (2006). It’s still my favourite book video ever…
Jimmy the Greatest!
By Jairo Buitrago
Illustrated by Rafael Yockteng
Translated by Elisa Amado
Groundwood Books (House of Anansi Press)
$18.95
ISBN: 978-1-55498-178-6
Ages 4-8
On shelves now
Once in a while I’ll be impressed by a book for kids, pick it up to review it, and in the course of writing the review become more and more impressed as I return to the book for double, triple, quadruple looks. It hasn’t happened all that much lately. Usually it requires a special kind of title. So when I saw Jimmy the Greatest! a month or so ago I thought it might make for a good review thanks to its subject matter. It’s not like fun stories set in poor Latin America villages appear on my desk every day. I read it and enjoyed it but it wasn’t until I reread it, and reread it, and reread it, and reread it some more that the sheer brilliance of this little number got to me. With a careful hand author/illustrator pair Jairo Buitrago and Rafael Yockteng have created a book that is an ode to the people who stay in small communities, helping and improving the daily lives of their friends and neighbors. This is a story that folks can relate to, no matter where they live. It’s a paean to the heroes of small town life. Unsung heroes, I have located your book.
Jimmy’s fishing village is not particularly big or impressive since “there is usually only one small church and, if you’re lucky, a little gym where you can hit a punching bag, skip rope or box.” Boxing is precisely what Jimmy and all the other kids in the village spend a lot of their time doing, until one day Don Apolinar (who runs the gym) gives Jimmy a box containing books, magazines, and information about a guy named Muhammad Ali. Suddenly Jimmy starts using those glasses he never paid much attention to before and he’s reading everything he can get his hands on. In time, Don Apolinar leaves the village for the big city, but that’s okay. Jimmy stays behind, opening a little library and improving the boxing ring, and making the village a better place.
I was discussing this book with a friend the other day and asked her, “Can you think of any other picture book where a character from a small town stays in that town to improve the lives of others?” She pointed out to me that while that may not happen in a lot of fictional picture books, it happens all the time in nonfiction ones. Of course usually in books like Planting the Trees of Kenya by Claire A. Nivola or She Sang Promise by Jan Godown Annino the hero goes away, gets some kind of training, then comes back to their village or tribe to improve life for others. The interesting thing about Jimmy the Greatest! is that our hero stays to make things better without ever having left himself. Yet what I liked about this was that the book doesn’t box Jimmy in. When he&rsq