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…and to all the illustrators who have won prizes in the prestigious international BIB award in this special, 50th-anniversary year.

I have been enthusing recently about Laura Carlin’s book The Promise, written by … Continue reading ... →

Trees are so much a part of our daily lives, whether we take them for granted or find ourselves fighting for their survival: so it is perhaps unsurprising that there are many stories from all over the world that feature trees, woods or forests as a central theme or ‘character’… … Continue reading ... →

The Amazing Tree
by John Kilaka
(North-South Books, 2009)

 
In this retelling of an African folktale the animals are hungry and there’s only one tree that has fruit on … Continue reading ... →

All the Wild Wonders – Poems of our Earth, edited by Wendy Cooling and illustrated by Piet Grobler is a collection of poetry which poses interesting questions about the world we live in. The poems encourage reflection on the wonders and beauty around us on our planet, and provoke thought about what the future holds given the impact humans have on the natural environment. There are poems in many different styles from Benjamin Zephaniah to William Blake, via Ogden Nash and John Milton, each juxtaposed in ways that draw out new and sometimes surprising comparisons.

Rich and colourful watercolour illustrations throughout make this look more like a picture book than many a poetry anthology whilst the embossed, textured cover and luxuriously thick paper that have been used for this new edition make this book simply delightful to hold in your hands as well as to read silently or aloud.

To celebrate publication of All the Wild Wonders in its new and exceptionally beautiful format earlier this spring I put some questions to Wendy Cooling, the editor of the anthology, about the way she works, the state of children’s poetry and what we could look for in the library or bookshop if we wanted to offer more great poems to the kids in our lives.

Playing by the book: When I look at the poetry books you’ve worked on sometimes they are described as being “written” by you, other times “edited” or “selected”. So what is a poetry editor? I see you almost more as a curator – you choose poems to present and juxtapose, rather than (I imagine) editing their actual words or structure?

Wendy Cooling: Yes, a poetry editor is really more like a curator than a book editor as he/she cannot change the words in a poem, or amend in any way without the poet’s consent. Sometimes an extract from a poem is agreed to but otherwise the poem is as the poet wrote it. The editor chooses and arranges the poems to present a theme or an idea in a coherent way.

An excerpt from All the Wild Wonders, illustrated by Piet Grobler

Playing by the book: Where and how do you start when you’ve a new anthology to curate? With lots of books on the table? Innumerable post-it notes?….

Wendy Cooling: The beginnings of an anthology are pure joy to me. I sit somewhere comfortable, often under a tree in the garden, surrounded by mountains of poetry collections and anthologies I just read and read and read… and use lots of post-it notes. I visit the Poetry Library in London’s Festival Hall and indulge in more poetry reading and lots of photocopying. I have of course far more poems that I can ever use.

An area specially for families and children in the Poetry Library.

The next bit is the hard bit, weeding out poems I love but don’t quite work for the age-group or within the overall developing theme. I look for a mixture of forms as I want to move children away from the idea that poems must rhyme. I look for writing from many cultures to give a sense of the universality of poetry.

I have a budget to consider too as of course poets are paid for the inclusion of a poem. There are always one or two very eminent poets we just can’t afford.

Playing by the book: So just with the words, there are plenty of different considerations. What about when an anthology is accompanied by illustrations, as many of yours are. When you are working on an anthology to what extent do you liaise with the illustrator?

Wendy Cooling: It is quite unusual for editor and illustrator to liaise, often the two never meet. Luckily I do get to see and comment on Piet Grobler‘s very earliest roughs. We don’t always quite agree on the meaning of a poem and can talk this through, quite a fascinating process. I think I’m very fortunate and do hope to work with Piet in the future.

Playing by the book: I’d love to be able to eavesdrop on those conversations where it turns out your two interpretations don’t quite match. I bet they are very rich and interesting!

What sort of anthology would you like to curate next if you could have an entirely free say in it? Is there a theme you’d especially like to explore which you haven’t yet?

Wendy Cooling: I have three ideas that I’m working on at the moment but won’t reveal them here!

Playing by the book: Fair enough – but I will be keeping my eyes peeled for future collections!

What about this then: Is there something that poetry does better or differently than other genres in your opinion?

Wendy Cooling: Poetry is very special as it helps children to really taste words and to experiment with their own writing. To children who struggle as readers, a poetry book is very liberating – poems are quite short and there’s no rule that says you must read them all. Poetry well-introduced can be perfect to get some children into reading – they all love the ‘no rules’ bit.

Poetry is wonderful at expressing a very deep thought in few words and with great immediacy. Children don’t become good readers until they are able to hear words sing in their heads, poetry helps them to experience this magic. Too often children are asked to find similes, metaphors, examples of alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc and they couldn’t care less what the poem is about. Let’s leave all the analysis for later on and introduce poems as pleasure, fun and excitement, things to make you laugh, feel and think.

An excerpt from All the Wild Wonders, illustrated by Piet Grobler

Playing by the book: What’s your opinion about the state of children’s poetry in the UK? Who are the up and coming children’s poets we should be looking out for?

Wendy Cooling: Children’s poetry is very strong at the moment but few publishers will publish it as they’re nervous of achieving the necessary sales. We need to be brave and to celebrate poetry. I’m very keen on James Carter and Rachel Rooney as well as more established poets like Michael Rosen, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard, Carol Ann Duffy, Roger McGough, Valerie Bloom, Judith Nicholls and many many more.

Playing by the book: This seems like an opportune moment to congratulate Rachel Rooney on making this year’s CLPE Poetry Award shortlist which was recently announced. And what about you? Do you write poetry yourself?

Wendy Cooling: I write myself but not for publication! It’s a great pleasure perhaps a personal indulgence in my case.

Playing by the book: Apart from All the Wild Wonders, what three other children’s poetry anthologies would you encourage us to seek out if we were looking at starting a home poetry library?

Wendy Cooling: There are many terrific anthologies to look at, one of my favourites is Adrian Mitchell‘s A Poem a Day, it’s a delight to dip into and perfect for families to look at together. A Caribbean Dozen edited by John Agard and Grace Nichols is special too. If you can’t go to the Caribbean this is the next best thing as it invites you to experience the rhythms and atmosphere of another land.

There’s nothing like a live poet though, listening to them read, or perform their own poems can be a great experience. Children love to perform their poems too but should only be encouraged to learn by heart poems they really want to remember for ever.

Playing by the book: I couldn’t agree more with you Wendy. Thank you.

An excerpt from All the Wild Wonders, illustrated by Piet Grobler

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…

Sometimes this blog gives the impression that life in our home is idyllic, that I’m some sort of super mum and that our house gives off a continual pleasant, warm and loving glow.

Well. Let me assure you that this is not the case.

In order to get the material for this post I caused my kids to weep and scream at me. I even took photos of them yelling at me.

And why?

Well, I may score good marks on the glitter and glue front but I’ve failed utterly and totally when it comes to my kids and food: M is the fussiest eater I know, and J loves to copy her big sister so she too eats a hugely self-restricted diet (M will only eat 4 cooked things: sausages, egg noodles, fish fingers and, at a push, beefburgers. Yep, that’s it…).

So when along came a really lovely picture book about being a fussy eater I was delighted. Might it provide the breakthrough I’m constantly looking for?

One day Katharine Quarmby and Piet Grobler‘s Fussy Freya decides all the food she used to like is no longer yummy. She simply refuses to touch it. Her parents try to keep their cool but when the food they’ve lovingly prepared gets thrown on the floor they despair and decide to call on Grandma’s help.

When Freya throws down the gauntlet and tells her granny that she want to eat giraffe and other wild animals, Grandma calls her bluff and prepares precisely what Freya has requested. Warthog stuffed with cheese, grilled giraffe with cheese or mashed monkey, any one? Will this revolting food be a hit with Freya, or will she realise that what her parents offer her is actually rather yummy and so much more appealing than the exotic dishes her grandparents prepare for her?

Katharine Quarmby’s rolling, rhyming tale of a fussy eater is great fun. There’s a lovely little refrain that kids will quickly pick up on and join in with, and the mixture of humour, naughtiness and rather shocking dishes (most kids love a little bit of squeamishness, especially if it’s safely at arms’ length in the pages of a book) are great ingredients combined to make a satisfying tale. Piet Grobler’s illustrations are full of gorgeous colour and perfectly match the slightly grotesque story, being both full of love and warmth, and seasoned with a sharp edge.

One final aspect I really like about Fussy Freya is that Freya’s family is a mixed race family. This isn’t commented upon at all in the story – her’s is just a normal, “unremarkable” family. It’s great to see this in a picture book as it doesn’t happen often.

In the spirit of Fussy Freya I thought I’d offer my girls some really ghastly food in the hope that they’d realise that my offerings of “normal” food were actually quite ok.

For starters I gave them a bowl of snot. (Can you think of a child who doesn’t pick her nose?)

Cream cheese with a bit of food colouring, and bread st

Everybody has a song,
be it short or be it long,
in the right or in the wrong key,
Like the hee-haw of a donkey,
Twitter, tweet, tu-whit, tu-whoo,
howl or growl or quack or moo.
[…]
Don’t be silent
nor afraid,
you must sing
as you’ve been made.

Translation by Stan Dragland of the South African poem “Elke outjie…” by Philip de Vos

Welcome, everybody, to this week’s Poetry Friday, which we are delighted to be hosting.  Please leave comments below with links to your “songs” and I’ll be updating this post throughout the day.

The above poem comes from the joyous anthology Under the Spell of the Moon: Art for Children from the World’s Great Illustrators.  This superb book, first published by Groundwood in Canada in 2004, then in the UK in 2006 by Frances Lincoln, is now available for the first time in paperback (Frances Lincoln, 2012). Produced by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), the book is edited by erstwhile President of IBBY and founder of Groundwood Patsy Aldana, and has a thought-provoking Foreword by award-winning author Katherine Paterson.  It provides a fantastic showcase of 32 illustrators from across the globe, who have all donated their work to benefit IBBY – indeed 12.5% of the book’s proceeds go to IBBY.  Illustrators include Piet Grobler, who illustrated the poem cited above, as well as many others of my personal favorites such as Mitsumasa Anno (Japan), Peter Sís (Czech Republic/USA), Anthony Browne (UK), Isol (Argentina), Pulak Biswas (India), Luis Garay (Nicaragua) – and the book has also introduced me to many illustrators whose work I intend to explore further…

Each illustrator was asked to “illustrate a text of his or her own choosing, be it a poem, nursery rhyme, song, piece of prose, riddle or street game.”  The result is a wonderfully eclectic gathering of mostly verse that is given in its original language, sometimes incorporated into the artwork, and, where necessary, in English translation: and indeed a special shout-out must go to Stan Dragland’s virtuoso translations.  The quirkiness of the collection probably comes from this freedom of choice given to the global spread of illustrators: so each page turn brings a surprise, both in text and artistic style.  The one thing that links every page is the joie de vivre of the texts and the virtuosity each illustrator has brought to his or her contribution.

And n

photo by H Dickins www.flickr.com

I picked up this book at the library immediately because most parents I know, including myself and my husband, deal with a fussy eater. My stepson is not terrible, but there’s still some days when he will throw me for a loop over something he won’t eat. That’s kind of what happens to Freya’s parents in this book. I think this book is an hysterical way to get kids to go back to eating foods they decided they didn’t like anymore, but some parents might find it a bit extreme in dealing with fussy eaters. Read on . . .

*Picture book for preschoolers through second graders
*Young girl as main character
*Rating: Fussy Freya is a great book for talking to kids about eating and not being a picky eater. The illustrations are super cute and fun!

Short, short summary: Katharine Quarmby tells Freya’s tale of being a fussy eater in rhyme with some repeatable text. Fussy Freya is great for a read aloud in a classroom, at a library story time, or before bedtime. Freya used to eat all her food; but one day, she decides that she is not going to eat her mum’s dhal and rice, even though her baby brother and the cat eat every spicy bite. She says some not-so-nice things to her mum and does not eat anything her mum puts in front of her. She throws fits–throwing fish on the floor, which the cat loves, of course. But soon, her mum and dad have had enough, and so Mum calls Grandma. Grandma tells Mum that she acted the same way when she was three years old, and Grandma says, “Send her to me!” When Freya goes to Grandma’s house, she’s sure she will get anything she wants–candy and sweets, especially. But she is not prepared for the lesson that Grandpa and Grandma teach Freya about the delicious food she could be getting at her parents’ house. Cute idea and the illustrations in Fussy Freya are the type that children can look at again and again and find new stuff while teaching a small lesson to fussy eaters.

So, what do I do with this book?

1. Ask children to draw a collage of their favorite foods. (You could also have them cut pictures out of magazines.) Once children have their collages made, ask them to write a short poem (with a rhyming 2nd and 4th line like in Fussy Freya) about one of their favorite foods (or all of them). If you have young students, you could write one poem together as a class that they could copy, or they could write a poem at home with their families. Display the collages and the poems around the room.

2. This is a great book for starting a discussion with students about manners since Freya displays so many bad manners throughout the book. You can easily use Fussy Freya as part of character education. Have fun with it! Maybe students can even role play examples of good and bad manners.

3. This is also a great book to use for teaching about the Food Pyramid and healthy eating. The United States Department of Agriculture has many resources for teachers to talk with students of all ages about nutrition and healthy eating. Click the link and check them out!

Before I was in first grade, I was Fussy Margo. My mom made me all sorts of separate meals, so I didn’t have to eat what my parents were eating. Then in first grade, my teacher had a food challenge. We got a star on a chart for each new food we tried. I loved this contest and came in 2nd place. Since then, I haven’t been quite as fussy. So, it’s an idea if you have some fussy eaters around you.

Any more ideas? Let us know!

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!

As the nights start to draw in at bedtime here in the North of England, we start to long for a bit of color – and we have two bilingual English/Spanish books to hand at the moment, both of which we recently reviewed on PaperTigers - De Colores: Bright with Colors, a traditional Spanish song illustrated brightly indeed by David Diaz, who is currently one of our featured artists (Marshall Cavendish, 2008); and Colors! ¡Colores!, by Jorge Luján, and exquisitely illustrated by Piet Grobler, (Groundwood Books, 2008).

We haven’t sung De Colores yet but I’m sure we will and meanwhile, the words and pictures are as warm and bright as the music will be.

And we have all fallen in love with Jorge Luján’s whimsical poem, which is definitely to be savoured and re-read – even at the same sitting. It makes a lovely, gentle bed-time read and sends the imagination floating away towards the land of dreams. Jorge, let us know if it is ever turned into a video like Tarde de invierno / Winter Afternoon!