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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…

Prompted by my reading of exiled Argentinian children’s writer, Jorge Lujàn’s essay in the recent issue of PaperTigers, I went to my library to take out his books.  I found three: Sky Blue Accident Accidente Celeste, Rooster Gallo and Colors ¡Colores! In reading them to my daughter, I was immediately enchanted. The stories were palpably poetic.  In Sky Blue Accident, for example, a boy crashes into the sky and puts the broken pieces into his pocket.  In Rooster, when the rooster opens its beak, the sun comes up, opens its hand and gives birth to the day.  In Colors, night has a black gown in which stars — the ‘eyes of the universe can shine more brightly.’  Some of you may recognize at once the magical realist quality of these stories for which Latin American writers are particularly renown.  Personifying colors and natural elements like the sky and the day without being stereotypical takes a special creative knack and Lujàn has that knack in spades, so to speak.  And of course, such creative and perceptive views of the world are an illustrator’s delight.  These books have different illustrators with their own unique style.  Sky Blue Accident and Colors are illustrated by Piet Grobler whose style is captivatingly quirky as in Sky Blue Accident or breezily ephemeral as in the watercolor swathes found in Colors.  Rooster is illustrated by Manuel Monroy.  The bird is painted a speckled blue; it’s body is a metaphor for the sky.  I liked how the speckles flew off as stars at one point in the book, and how the rooster eats a star with a star gleaming in its eye on the next page.

Lujàn’s books are bilingual in Spanish and English.  Although I’m not particularly familiar with Spanish, I enjoyed reading the Spanish text aloud to my daughter.  We learned Spanish words a la Lujàn in a totally new and delightful way!