I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth; illustrated by Sami Suomalainen
Lobster Press
This whimsical treatment of Wordsworth's poem by a Finnish illustrator for a Canadian publisher--now making its way to us Yanks--is a testament to the enduring and universal power of the poet's imagery.
Suomalainen dedicates the book to "the power of flowers" and creates a candy-striped robot who wheels out of a gray, oily, surreally mechanized city:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
The daffodils cavort and lift our robot narrator out of his gloom. Stripes of amber and green on the daffodils' petals and stems echo the robot's patterns, and soon the mechanical becomes organic and vice-versa, with a little of each in the other.
The city's conveyor belt streets come alive with giant, dancing flowers and the other androids take on more vibrant hues, as if showing how flowers can pretty much perk up the gloomiest cityscape.
I agree, and had a lot of fun with this quirky pairing of a Romantic pen with a Modernist brush.
Rating: *\*\*\
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