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Peaceful Pieces: Poems and Quilts About Peace
By Anna Grossnickle Hines
Henry Holt (Macmillan)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-8050-899607
Ages 4-8
On shelves now.

Folks will ask for it. Sure they will. You sit at a children’s reference desk in a library long enough and eventually somebody is going to ask you for a book on the topic of “peace”. As a librarian, you’re in a pickle. See, you want to give them what they want, and certainly there is no lack of peace-related books for children out there. But since you’re a librarian you want to get your patrons to best of the best. And to be perfectly frank, I’d say that the bulk of peace books for kids out there are dreck. Goopy, icky, sentimental crud. There are exceptions, of course. Books like The Big Book for Peace for example are pretty good without dipping a toe too often in the tempting waters of didacticism. Poetry exists too but as with most things it’s hard to separate the good from the bad. You get a leg up if the art’s extraordinary, though. Now Anna Grossnickle Hines probably ranks as one of the top (maybe THE top) quilt-based illustrators of children’s books on the North American continent. I regularly use her 1, 2 Buckle My Shoe in my Toddler Storytimes. Her art is delightful but I admit to suppressing a small sigh when I saw that she’d created a book of peace poems. Fortunately I was pleased to discover that quite a few of these are pretty good. The poems are far more touch and go than the art, but all in all the collection is strong. And pretty. Did I mention pretty? Pretty.

“O peace, / why are you such / an infrequent guest?” In twenty-eight poems Anna Grossnickle Hines seeks to answer that very question and to come up with solutions to some close-to-home problems that kids face all the time. Set against a backdrop of handmade quilts of her own making, Hines tackles both the big questions and the small. A boy considers what would happen if he frightened away a deer, while another stands nose to nose with his sister until their anger is forgotten and somebody laughs. One poem shows that if you say “peace” over and over again the word turns your lips into a smile. They discuss the domino effect and the role of fear as it relates to violence. Through it all, the quilts capture these poems and reflect them like cloth prisms. Notes at the end of the book list some Peacemakers of the world (everyone from Jimmy Carter to Dorothy Day, and even a couple kids as well) and a section called “Peaceful Connections” discusses the creator’s quilting process.

Most collections of poetry for kids contain some poems that are top notch and others that are so-so. This is just as true for books of different poets as it is for a single poet writing a bunch of poems. Hines is a good poet, but the collection starts off slowly. The poems “Making an Entrance”, “An Invitation” and “Wher

A Little Bitty Man and Other Poems for the Very Young
By Halfdan Rasmussen
Translated by Marilyn Nelson and Pamela Espeland
Illustrated by Kevin Hawkes
Candlewick Press
$15.99
ISBN: 978-0763623791
Ages 3-8
On shelves now.

Denmark! Mention the country and children’s literature in one breath and what would most Americans think of? Well, if they were well-versed in the form they might think of Hans Christian Andersen. Our national interest in children’s authors from other countries is sparse, but once in a while someone pierces the collective unconscious. Unfortunately for us, Danish children’s literature begins and ends with the esteemed Andersen. For all we know, that country’s interest in kids’ fare began and ended with his reign. So it was with great interest that I became acquainted with one Halfdan Rasmussen. Former resistance fighter against the German occupation, human rights advocate, and children’s poet, the man wore many a hat in his day. Having already been introduced to U.S. kids in the previous publication The Ladder, Rasmussen returns to our public eye with a collection of younger fare. Sweet and jaunty by turns, A Little Bitty Man exhibits all the best aspects of classic children’s poetry. You may have never known this Rasmussen fellow before but after reading this you’ll be happy to make his acquaintance.

Thirteen poems of relative brevity are collected together. Ranging from the realistic to the fantastical, Rasmussen dares to spark young imaginations with this collection. In it you’ll encounter an elf with a singular method of retaining warmth in a chilly proboscis, a dolly with latrophobia, incontinent rainclouds, clever goats, literary fowl, and many more. Accompanied by the delicate, charming illustrations of Kevin Hawkes, this is one poetic introduction you’ll be happy to have made.

I can’t think of the last time a funny poem for kids made me laugh out loud. So imagine my surprise when I found myself reading the poem “You Can Pat My Pet” and ran across these two stanzas: “You can pat my dog for a dime / and my horse for an egg and a half. / You can pat my favorite aunt / if you give me your granddad’s moustache.” It proceeds to get sillier after that but I just love the exchange of aunt patting for facial hair. Rasmussen does not choose to be a funny poet for kids or a meaningful one. He’s both at once. For the most part, when Rasmussen is trying to be insightful, he succeeds. “What Comes Next” is lovely. “What Things Are For” feels like a natural companion to the picture book A Hole Is to Dig by Ruth Krauss. The sole fly in the ointment is “Those Fierce Grown-Up Soldiers” which is the kind of poem we’ve seen done a hundred times before, and never particula

Lemonade: And Other Poems Squeezed for a Single Word
By Bob Raczka
Illustrated by Nancy Doniger
Roaring Brook (a division of Macmillan)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-59643-541-4
Ages 4-10
On shelves now.

The lady from Manhattan would like to register a complaint. The lady from Manhattan is aware, perfectly aware, that there are plenty of fabulous children’s poets in a given year. The lady from Manhattan would further state that she likes many of these authors and would like to review them more often but she feels that her hand is forced, FORCED I say, to instead review the works of one Bob Raczka. This, in her opinion, is unfair. Mr. Raczka should do everything in his power to write significantly less interesting books of children’s poetry. Perhaps he should consider a collection of bad limericks. That would certainly lower the bar enough for one to review his brethren with impunity. Instead, when a book like Lemonade comes across your plate, you have no choice but to review it. Brilliant and head-scratchingly insane by turns, Raczka writes one of the more inspiring books of poetry to come out in recent history. It really isn’t fair in the least. The lady objects.

Take a word. Now find as many words as you can out of that word. Now take those words and make a cohesive, coherent, and downright good poem. Impossible? Not if you ask Bob Raczka. Inspired by poet Andrew Russ’s “one-word poems”, Raczka manages to find and write twenty-two such poems. Sometimes they are short (the poem “friends” really just boils down to “fred finds ed”). Sometimes they are longer than you’d expect (“spaghetti” starts with “papa has a pasta appetite”). And in each poem you have to read the letters as they appear under their starting words on one page, and then in order as a normal poem on the next. A clever literary technique yields even cleverer little poems. This is a premise that surpasses its initial gimmick.

There are few books I have encountered that give you the feeling that you’re learning to read all over again. This is one of the few. Just reading a single poem, no matter how short, can be a challenge. Because the letters drop down to appear under their respective letters in the title, they do not fall into natural spaces or breaks. The result is that you might read the words “ivan in / ava in / ian in” instead as “ivan in a vain”. It almost feels like code breaking after a while (a not unpleasant sensation). Another advantage of the format is that certain poems mimic their subject matter. The poem “moonlight”, for example, mimics its subject, a moth, flitting in concentric circles down a page.

If you’re tired of the old haiku you could do worse than to try blackout poems where you take newspaper articles and black out with a magic marker everything but a few words. Or how about spine poetry, where you create poems out of the titles of books piled on top of one another? Raczka’s one-sentence poems are inspired by a fellow by the name of Andrew Russ. Yet while Russ may have come up with the notion of making poems from common letters, it was Raczka who recognized the real kid-potential of the form. As a result, I suspect tha

Cousins of Clouds: Elephant Poems
By Tracie Vaughn Zimmer
Illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy
Clarion Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-618-90349-8
Ages 4-9
On shelves now

“Do you have any elephant books?” This is an easy one. The children’s librarian doesn’t have to think too hard about it. Just walk on over to the right section of the non-fiction, find the correct Dewey Decimal number, grab the books, and there you go. Happy kid. Happy librarian. Of course it’s not always that easy. Recently, and this is actually true, I’ve been encountering kids who want picture books about elephants. So my library whipped up an Elephant Picture Book List that includes all the great elephant related stories (Babar, Ella, Horton, Elephant and Piggie, you name it). It wasn’t until I got my digits on Tracie Vaughn Zimmer’s latest book of poems Cousins of Clouds, though, that I realized that there’s a middle ground between these pachyderm-related sections. I mean, what if you have a kid that wants a picture book about elephants but also wants some facts along the way? Whither goes the librarian? Cousins of Clouds is sort of a little nonfiction/poetry godsend then. Chock full of interesting elephant facts as well as cool poems, the book bridges the gap between fiction and nonfiction beautifully.

It’s hard to wrap your head around an elephant, let alone your arms. Here we have creatures weighing between 6,000 and 16,000 pounds. Animals that sometimes starve in the streets of cities and sometimes visit the bones of their deceased. In twenty-five poems of varying lengths Tracie Vaughn Zimmer takes us into the world of the elephant. You’ll see them walking down streets with cars and appearing on art from a variety of countries. You’ll see how they care for their young or are incorporated into the body of Ganesh. Accompanying each poem is a small factual message that gives additional information about the elephants being discussed. The end of the book also contains a list of recommended books “For further elephant reading” if kids are interested in knowing more about these majestic, gigantic animals.

There is a trend these days to integrate different subject areas in schools and textbooks so that kids can see how everything is connected. So, for example, a fifth grader might be encouraged to read about the history of the Dust Bowl, read the novel 0 Comments on Review of the Day: Cousins of Clouds by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer as of 1/1/1900