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PaperTigers most recent issue focuses on music.  In the Illustrator’s Gallery is featured the work of Satoshi Kitamura — an artist who has a ‘gift for illustrating poetry.’  In the gallery, one can see images from the book The Carnival of the Animals: Poems inspired by Saint-Saëns Music. As the title states, the book contains an array of poems (edited by Judith Chernaik) on the various animals featured in Camille Saint-Saën’s musical piece.  A CD accompanies the book.

My daughter and I recently had the opportunity to try the book and the CD out on our son’s brand new computer.  Using Windows media player which plays the music with accompanying graphics, we listened while flipping through the book.  The CD contains the poems read aloud followed by the musical pieces.  My daughter enjoyed anticipating which animal would come up next by looking at the pictures collected on the front page of the book and guessing through elimination which animal was next.  It was fun to see how image, text and music combined to create an overall effect or sense of the featured animals.  Sometimes, the poems were a reversal of the stereotypical image of an animal.  In “Tortoise” for example, poet Chernaik writes of a tortoise who “dreams of twirling on tabletops,/turning cartwheels,/kicking up her heels at the Carnival ball.”  My daughter disagreed with this picture, but I could see where the music might have inspired the poet’s notion of a tortoise as a dancer, say, in a slow but elegant waltz.  Here’s a video link to the poem and music: Carnival: Tortoise

Animals make wonderful inspiration for all kinds of art — music, poetry and drawing.  Carnival of the Animals is a great book for combining all these art forms to give a child a unique experience of text, image and sound.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Wild Rose Reader.

I’m a big fan of Allen Say so I was happy to see him featured recently in our illustrator’s gallery. I’ve read a number of his books but one I enjoyed recently was Music for Alice.  Alice is a Japanese American woman who loves to dance, but circumstances in her life prevent her from enjoying this dream to the full.  Born in California, Alice grows up, goes to college and marries a man named Mark who “wasn’t much of a dancer” and moves to Seattle, Washington.  Not long afterwards, the war comes, and Alice and Mark are sent to Portland, Oregon and are then removed inland to work farm fields on the eastern edge of the state.  Such hardship was difficult and as Alice puts it “Even the thought of dancing didn’t cheer me very much.”  The couple survive, however, and go on to buy a farm of their own on which they grow various crops until they hit upon the idea of growing flowers — gladioli — to be specific, and become the largest gladiola bulb growers in the U.S.

All throughout the book as Alice recounts her life, she reflects occasionally on her love of dancing.  It is not until the end of the book and the end of her life, does she suddenly come to an epiphany.  Looking on the ruins of her old farm house, she is overcome by a “wonderful feeling” that makes her suddenly ask, “Now I can dance?”  And as the book concludes, “And dance I do — all that I can.”

Music for Alice is an old woman’s meditation on the past.  Old age is its own frontier, and there are still things to learn and discover there.  Allen Say’s superb, nuanced illustrations evoke Alice’s life with clarity and depth.  I highly recommend his picture books which make wonderful reading for children and adults.