Rhyme with reason
Among the year's outstanding works for children are poetry books that combine melody and meaning
Puppies and Piggies
Written by Cynthia Rylant
Illustrated by Ivan Bates
Harcourt, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16
Imaginary Menagerie:A Book of Curious Creatures
Written by Julie Larios
Illustrated by Julie Paschkis
Harcourt, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16
Oodles of Animals
By Lois Ehlert
Harcourt, 56 pp., ages 4-8, $17
The World's Greatest: Poems
Written by J. Patrick Lewis
Illustrated by Keith Graves
Chronicle, 36 pp., ages 4-8, $16.99
No No Yes Yes
By Leslie Patricelli
Candlewick, 24 pp., ages 4-8, $6.99
Hogwash
By Arthur Geisert
Houghton Mifflin, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16
In his "Autobiography," John Stuart Mill wrote that his father told him it is useful to learn to write poetry because people attach greater importance to what you say in verse than they otherwise would. Such a notion may account for the current infestation of children's rhyming books. Every season brings more clunking "love-dove," "roam-home" rhymes, which make any attempt to read them aloud an embarrassment.
It's all the more noteworthy then that this season four children's books rhyme mellifluously, read well, and sport skillful mini-poems that leave room for the reader's poetical imagination to elaborate what is not made explicit.
Cynthia Rylant's "Puppies and Piggies" is engagingly illustrated in watercolor by Ivan Bates. The repetitive and basic text - "Goosey loves his honking, / Goosey loves his walk. / Goosey loves to find a friend / And talk and talk and talk" - is artfully spread over two pages, giving narrative thrust to the little goose strutting on the first page, and then, when you've turned over to the second, there are two geese gabbing at each other, presumably nonstop, as other barnyard animals look on with curiosity.
Julie Larios's "Imaginary Menagerie" features fanciful creatures from various mythologies. Julie Paschkis's renderings are small, dense gouache paintings that eschew white space, evoking a plenitude that suggests to us that they permeate the entire fantastical universe articulated in Larios's accompanying short poems. And the open-ended conclusions of the poems themselves actively engage the reader, so that of the Centaur she asks: "Can he be half gallop, half walk? / Half dream, half real? / Half neigh, half talk? / Can he be half man, half horse? / The answer is no. / And yes, of course."
Then, we have the monarch of collage, the queen of color. Lois Ehlert's "Oodles of Animals" is a stunning menagerie of fish, mammals, birds, and insects created of colored paper cut boldly with scissors, pinking shears, and a hole punch. Each creature is accompanied by a three- or four-line haiku-like insight touching on the creature's essence. The "Seal" for instance: "A seal / swims quicker / when wet / and slicker."
"The World's Greatest: Poems," by J. Patrick Lewis, is a slender volume with meticulously crafted poems inspired by the book Guinness World Records, with titles like "The Tallest Roller Coaster" and "The Most Kisses," all illustrated with captivating wit, each poem working perfectly as a bit of trivia that's truly elevated, or framed, to be a real and effectual mini-poem.
These four books are written in verse that is neither tone-deaf nor violently cobbled together metrically. Here are verses, fleeting or profound, that have actually become poems with insight, fleeting or profound. In some way, after reading, we know more than we knew before.
A very different genre is the board book. One pleasing new example is Leslie Patricelli's "No No Yes Yes," which has the advantage of amusing both adult and 2-year-old, with pages on the left side displaying a baby engaging in antisocial activities (i.e., pulling the cat's tail), and the facing pages showing the same baby doing as he ought (gently petting the cat, etc.). It is the undisguised glee with which baby is naughty, and the cheerful happiness that makes it right, that give the book its daffy merriment.
Finally, a sort of apotheosis of nonsense, a wordless picture book by that prolific master Arthur Geisert, who has now etched more than 24 children's books, the majority of which feature a world inhabited by little, cunning pigs. Keeping a straight face, he has devised a universe in which thousands of Geisertian piggies celebrate Thanksgiving, solve crimes, and demonstrate Roman numerals. And now, in "Hogwash" we are given an extraordinary and otherworldly jubilee of child-pigs being lined up by their mommies and marched to a washing establishment. First, the piggies wallow in a giant mud puddle, after which they disport themselves with barrels of red, blue, yellow paint. Thoroughly filthy now, the pigs are herded by grown-up supervisors through a series of showers, baths, brushings, until finally, cleaned up and free of soap, they are hung out to dry on an endless rotating clothesline and later returned to their mothers.
The platoons of implausible pigs are as bizarrely original and profoundly humorous as always, but the other appeal of "Hogwash" is the washing machinery, the practical engineering of the pulleyed, cantilevered, counterweighted, heated, cooled, and articulated Rube Goldbergian pig-washing-establishment. You may think some of the pictured joints and hinges are arbitrary, but sit down with a child and follow all the props, struts, lines, and you will find that every detail fulfills a purpose, and the whole ramshackle edifice works to wash entire populations of pigs with aplomb, economy, and dispatch.
This way lies madness. That nagging thought is precisely what makes many of Geisert's seemingly rational pig worlds so exhilarating.
Author and critic Peter F. Neumeyer can be reached at neum1400@aol.com.
