Arthropoda Poesy: Hey There, Stinkbug by Leslie Bulion

Summertime is bugtime! Some, like fireflies and butterflies, have their charms. Some, like wasps and spiders, have their purpose, and some, like stinkbugs--nobody loves 'em, nobody wants 'em. They're better left all on their lonesome!

I think you're lost,
'cause you're walking up my arm,
But I won't tease you,
Wouldn't dare squeeze you--
Please don't trigger
Your stink alarm.

And then, there's the bombadier beetle, a most regrettable, hopefully soon forgettable creature, not glad to meet ya!

Bombadier, bombadier, bombadier beetle,
Slow on the wing, but fast on his feetle.
Blasting poor predators into retreatle,
With pure boiling hot acid it aims from its seatle.

And even those fabulous fireflies, on summer nights so delightful--when you get to know them better, they're a perfectly frightful! The poor blinkin' firefly boys are sometimes blinded by the light!

He'll fly and he'll flash and he'll wait for an answer.
From a FLASH Gal that's eager to meet him.
And up close she's likely to eat him!

For middle readers who may tend to eschew entomology, Leslie Bulion's jolly lessons on common arthropoda are great fun for summer reading that beg to be read aloud. In her twenty chapters author Bulion and artist Leslie Evans provide some delightful graphics, done by the illustrator in linoleum prints of her creepy crawly subjects Along with her highly humorous poesy, the author packs plenty of information into her Hey There, Stink Bug! (Charlesbridge Publishing), including a glossary and bibliography of books and websites, and for poetry fanciers, also appends fascinating descriptions of the various and offbeat poetic forms used in her poetic descriptions.

"How Fragile Is the Boat...." Emily Dickinson (Poetry for Kids) edited by Susan Snively

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me --

Almost unknown in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's letters to the world, short, nature-infused poems hidden away in her room in the old house in Amherst, made her one of the most beloved of poets in the twentieth century. And today the freshness of her voice, the immediacy of her personality, and her way of finding "a World in a grain of sand, Heaven in a flower, and Eternity in an hour" as English poet William Blake put it, speaks as powerfully as ever.

Dickinson's immediate surroundings became the simple subjects of her poems--a bird, a snowstorm, a snake (her "narrow fellow in the grass"), a word, a book--but the universality of her poems sits well with the young today. In many ways she is "thoroughly modern Emily," perhaps the earliest of the modern poets, whose off-rhymes and spare language, filled with wry wordplay and inventive simile and metaphor, combine humor with depth of meaning:

Hope is a thing with feathers....
That perches in the soul.

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away...

How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul.

Dickinson has a way of personifying her allusions with homely images that children understand:

Like brooms of steel
The Snow and Wind
Had swept the Winter Street.

A near recluse, a baker, caretaker, a woman "who never saw the sea," she had no vapid Victorian lady's soul. Here is Emily on science:

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

Edited by Susan Snively, the just-published Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson (MoonDance Press, 2016) provides thirty-five of Dickinson's poems, some well-known and some lesser so, but all of which are carefully selected for middle readers, offering as all her poems do, a startlingly new look at common things and questions that all of us, kids, too, ask ("Will there really be a morning?"). With benedictions for butterflies and bees, a look at Death personified as a kindly wagon driver, and a little snake that still inspires "zero at the bone," Snively's selections, sorted by the seasons, give young readers a varied and generous look at Dickinson's work. There is no better teacher of the power of poetry than Emily Dickinson. With exquisite illustrations by the noted artist Christine Davenier, this slim new annotated anthology is inviting, intriguing and absorbing, offering an arresting and yet accessible introduction to a true American master. As Emily tells us...

A word is dead
When it is said
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

The Magic of Words: A Child's Introduction to Poetry edited by Michael Driscoll

Poetry Month is almost here, and lovers of the language are looking for ways to turn children on to poetry without the turn off that so many remember from their school days.

Michael Driscoll's A Child's Introduction to Poetry: Listen While You Learn About the Magic Words That Have Moved Mountains, Won Battles, and Made Us Laugh and Cry takes the middle way. His introduction to poetry begins with the light stuff--nursery rhymes, nonsense verse, and limericks--with plenty of humor, easy on the technical talk. In fact, there's neither onomatopoeia nor anapest in his explanatory text, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't do justice to the genres of poetry as well as its joys.

In Part One, Driscoll moves through those basic genres--nursery rhymes, nonsense verse, limericks, haiku, narrative and lyric verse, ballads and pastoral verse, the sonnet and free verse, as well as what he terms "Poems Peculiar," a catchall group that includes epitaphs, alphabet rhymes, riddles, shaped poems and the like. Each type has its description, history, and samples from well-known poets, all with ample illustrations. Boxes titled "Words for the Wise" define words and devices, such as "wanton" and "symbol," used in the poems, and glosses explain the poets' meanings stanza by stanza. The pedagogy is accomplished with a light touch, backed up by plenty of humorous pictures. After all, who could resist the sheer pleasure of word play in this economical little epitaph?

HERE LIES LESTER MOORE.
FOUR SLUGS FROM A .44--
NO LES,
NO MORE.

Part Two takes on a historical structure, beginning with Homer's Iliad, and including major past poets--Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, with kid-friendly but solid selections from each. Later poets featured are W. H. Auden, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, and Maya Angelou. A compact disc of poems by these writers is included within the book's jacket to provide the sound of the spoken poem as an extension of the poem on the printed page.

Of course, no one volume can do justice to the universe of poetry available in English. Other favorably reviewed introductions include X. J. Kennedy's Knock at a Star: A Child's Introduction to Poetry and Elise Paschen's Poetry Speaks to Children (Book & CD) (Read & Hear).