"This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness" by Joyce Sidman, Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski (LS 5663)

Sidman, Joyce. 2007. This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

ISBN: 978-0-544-10507-2 paperback

Cover image from
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
www.hmhbooks.com

When I first picked up Joyce Sidman's This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, I was expecting something entirely on the somber side.  Then I opened the book to find William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just to Say" that offers an apology to someone who left a bowl of delicious plums in the refrigerator, because he ate them.  Williams tries to sound contrite, but the utter lusciousness of the plums adds a bit of "sorry, not sorry" to the poem.  The very next poem is written to imitate Williams as a young man named Thomas, apologizes to Mrs. Garcia in the front office for stealing the jelly doughnuts.  In a cheeky tone, Thomas says,

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so gloppy 

Too bad
the powdered sugar
spilled all over my shirt
and gave me
away (Sidman 2007, 8).

And thus sets the tone for the rest of the book.  The first half contains eighteen poems, written by a sixth grade class and their teacher, followed by seventeen more poems that contain a response of forgiveness to the writers of the apologies.  The book is set up as the product of the fictitious sixth grade class of Mrs. Merz at the Florence Scribner School, edited by one of the students, Anthony K., who begins the book with a brief note, saying how it began as an assignment to write "Sorry" poems in the same vein of Williams' "This Is Just to Say."  Anthony then wryly notes that he had the fantastic idea to get the recipients of the apologies to write a response, and the class put them together in a book, illustrated by one of their classmates, with help from the art teacher.  The book is so well put together, that several reviewers on Goodreads were convinced that Mrs. Merz and her class were real.  The poems run the gamut from the cheeky and amusing, like Thomas' poem to Mrs. Garcia, to poignant to the expected solemn poems you'd expect to see in a book of apology poems.  (Warning to the more marshmallowy of you out there: keep a tissue or two handy.  There are a few that tug at the heart strings.)  Sometimes, a response poem is written by a proxy, as in the case of Bao Vang, who wrote a poem of apology to the statue of Florence Scribner, but received a response from DaRon, who wrote in the voice of Florence Scribner.  These poems are probably the most poignant, because they generally commiserate with the person writing the apology.  Two apology poems -- "It Was Quiet" and "Spelling Bomb" -- share a thematic tone in that the authors feel as if they let someone down.  In the case of "It Was Quiet," Tenzin apologizes to his beloved dog, Einstein, for having him put to sleep.  The response from Mr. Johnson, the school custodian, tries to offer Tenzin comfort by explaining he recently had to do the same thing with his own dog, and Tenzin was with Einstein, "loving him, and he was loving you back. / That's how he went. / And that's how a dog should go" (Sidman 2007, 38).

Sidman writes the poems in a mostly free-verse format, but there are two poems that were written in a specific format.  One, a response by Mrs. Merz is written in a haiku, and the other, by Anthony in a apology to his mother for not winning the spelling bee, was written in a form called a pantoum (Sidman 2007, 22).  A pantoum repeats lines two and four of a stanza as lines one and three in the very next stanza (Sidman 2007, 22).  The effect is especially powerful, as Anthony's mea culpa resonates throughout the entire poem, as he acknowledges how he must have horribly disappointed his mother, and how she's taught him "how important it is to win" (Sidman 2007, 22).

Sidman uses a lot of figurative and descriptive language in her poems.  In the poem, "I Got Carried Away," Sidman calls the bounce of the ball, "thumping like a heartbeat,"  which reflects the excitement of playing a spirited game of dodge ball (Sidman 2007, 10).  She tends to use a lot of metaphors, which reflects the age of the ersatz authors of the poem, who are trying to put what they feel in terms they can understand.  The language is richly descriptive, comparing an uncomfortable silence to "a hundred crushing elephants;" the hole left in a pan of freshly-baked brownies "gap[ing]  / like an accusing eye;" the anger in the principal's eyes "like hot sparks;" or how the class lizard Slow-Hand was "stiff as an old glove" when he died (Sidman 2007, 12; 14; 24; 26).  Sidman (2007) also utilizes a well-placed adjectives, so the reader can visualize the freshly-baked brownies, with "gooey hunks of chocolate / wink[ing] at me as I gobbled them" (14).  Mrs. Merz's mother had a glass deer with "slim pink legs" and an "arching neck" nestled in "rough cotton snow" (Sidman 2007, 17).  The reader is able to visualize the small glass deer, bounding through a Christmas scene.  A mother who straightens her daughter's desk calls it "an island of neatness / in an ocean of mess" (Sidman 2007, 32).  Anybody who's ever had a messy room will immediately recognize how fully Sidman manages to describe what a tidied desk will look like in the middle of all that messiness.  In "Sorry Back," Ricky's hamster (or Ricky writing as his hamster) writes how Ricky's mother's hand "was a huge scary claw," which places the reader in the position of the hamster, giving them some insight into just how frightening a person's hand can seem to a hamster (Sidman 2007, 37).  In the poem "Little Brother," written by DaRon's older brother Lamar the descriptive language enumerates all of the qualities DaRon has that Lamar appreciates, such as Daron's "sticky shoes... [that] stay on the ground" (Sidman 2007, 39).  In a response to Raleesha, Carmen and Mrs. Merz write a lovely poem that celebrates Raleesha for who she is, and not what she could mold herself into in order to attract attention.  They praise her "frown that breaks rocks" and "laugh that starts tidal waves" (Sidman 2007, 41).  Another poem with lovely uses of descriptive language is "Ode to Slow-Hand," written by the class to the anonymous classmate who accidentally killed Slow-Hand.  The class remembers "his toes whispered on our hands," "his skin, rough green cloth," "his belly, soft as an old balloon," and "his tongue: lightning's flicker" (Sidman 2007, 45).  It's a loving remembrance of a fellow being, punctuated repeatedly with the phrase "los perdonamos," as the class' forgiveness washes over the anonymous person in the manner envisioned by Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: "The quality of mercy is not strain'd, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from the heaven" (Sidman 2007, 45; IV.1.i.184-185).  It's a fitting end to the book, this paean to forgiveness.

Sidman often uses the structure of a poem to communicate the thought process or feeling behind a poem.  In "I'm Telling You Now" by José's dad, the long, rambling, unbroken thought reflects how José's feels uncomfortable about the idea of writing the poem, and even possibly how emotionally naked Dad feels, but ending by assuring José that the broken windows José felt compelled to apologize for are ancient history and he shouldn't worry about them.  "I Got Carried Away" and "Dodge Ball Crazy" feature structures where the words moving across the page mimic the motion of a ball streaking across a gym.  "What Was I Thinking," "Some Reasons Why," "Fashion Sense," and "The River of Forgiveness" emulate the narrator gathering their thoughts.  Sometimes, the spaces, like in "To the Girl Who Rubs My Nose," give the narrator a chance highlight something significant.  In "Next Time," Jewel is terrified that her behavior has driven her father away.  The lines "I'm sorry, Daddy" and  "Next time I'll be / perfect" are separated by a space so Jewel's apology can sink into the reader, and the plaintive tone of her promise to be perfect rings as the final note of the apology (Sidman 2007, 25).  The poems are also printed in different fonts, which also contributes to the feeling as if different people composed and typed each poem.

The poems are eminently relatable.  Students know how it feels to say something in an effort to bring levity to the classroom, and inadvertently hurt someone else's feelings.  They've had to have beloved pets put to sleep.  They've broken windows on the house or a parent's prized knick-knack.  They've felt intimidated into ratting out friends to principals.  They've nicked someone else's yummy jelly doughnuts or brownies, and sure, they feel remorse, but not too much, because the baked goods' deliciousness outweighed the remorse.  We are the weird younger sibling or the gruff, but loving older sibling.  We get carried away playing dodge ball or any other sport or playground game.  It is this level of relatability that gives the poems an aura of sentimentality, in that a reader can place themselves in that situation.  They are not of a sentimental vibe that makes a your teeth hurt from the sugary sweetness of the sentiment.

The book has a table of contents that is split into the two parts of apologies and responses.  Each poem lists the "author" in the table of contents.  On the actual poem, after the title the "author" includes who the intended recipient of the poem was.  The actual poems contain a heading with recipient and title and the author at the end.  The pages are also numbered, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you're dealing with more than ten poems, page numbers are valuable when you want to quickly find a specific poem.  Sidman's website has a section for This Is Just to Say that has a reader's guide and play adaptation, along with a video of Sidman reading one of the poems.  It also gives more details into the origins of the book.  There's also a writer's guide with advice to beginning poets from the "students" of Mrs. Merz's class.

This Is Just to Say was a Lee Bennett Hopkins honor book in 2007 and the Claudia Lewis Award in 2008.

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Spotlight on...

"Balance" 

To my dad 

Dad, I'm sorry for smashing
the garage window when I was a kid.
Felipe and I were messing around
and saw the cracked pane.
One had a crack,
so they should all have a crack, right?
That's what Felipe said.
We hefted some rocks. 

Then one pane had a jagged hole.
But they all had to match, right?
Felipe said we should balance them out.
I remember the weight of the gritty ricks,
the shiver of tinkling glass,
the wild joy blooming in my chest,
the fear, the running away.
For a while, it seemed like
the bravest thing I had ever done. 

Now I realize Felipe was stupid
to make up a reason to smash things.
And I was even more stupid,
to follow him. 

by José (Sidman 2007, 16)

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In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, Jews are encouraged to seek out their friends and family and ask for forgiveness for any wrongs that they have done to them, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's a pretty humbling thing to do.  "Balance" is one of the many poems in Sidman's This Is Just to Say that would make an excellent introduction into the concept of asking for forgiveness for Jewish adolescents in the process of completing their bar/bat mitzvah and becoming responsible for themselves as Jews in the world.

Students in the class can discuss what it means to ask someone for forgiveness and what it means to forgive other people.  While there is basically a ritualized speech, so to speak, for asking forgiveness during the High Holy Days, it might be more meaningful for the students to make their apologies personal and write a poem to someone they would like to offer an apology.  It can be a friend (Jewish or not) or family member.  Like the students in Mrs. Merz's class, the bar/bat mitzvah students can choose to illustrate their apology poems.  The students are strongly encouraged to share the poems with their person.
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Works Cited

Sidman, Joyce. 2007. This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness. Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

"Face Bug" by J. Patrick Lewis, Photographs by Frederic B. Siskind, Illustrations by Kelly Murphy (LS 5663)

Lewis, J. Patrick. 2013. Face Bug. Photographs by Frederic B. Siskind. Illustrated by Kelly Murphy.  Honsdale, PA: WordSong.

ISBN: 978-1-59078-925-4

Photo of cover
by: L. Propes

Face Bug by J. Patrick Lewis, with illustrations by Kelly Murphy and photographs by Frederic B. Siskind imagines the book as a trip through a museum exhibit about bugs.  It's a conceit that works, due in large part to Murphy's whimsical ink and graphite drawings that serve as the binding element to the book.  In a series of fifteen poems, Lewis introduces us to several insects that look far more fearsome than they really are.  Some are annoying or bite, but overall, they're relatively harmless.  But in all honesty, some of these insects are...  Well, let's just say I wouldn't want to hang their framed head shots in my living room.  Siskind provides bright color photographs of each insect.  When I saw the cover of the book with the image of a seemingly happy praying mantis, my first thought was "I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeVille!"

The book contains a table of contents, which is presented as a list of bugs on exhibit.  Each bug also has a small thumbnail of its portrait next to its name.  The title of each poem is the name of the insect featured in the poem.  There is also a subtitle which is the binomial, or Latin, name.  The subtitles don't appear on the table of contents, but they do appear on the actual poem.  The end of the book has a section that has more information about the bugs.  It's presented in a sort of "getting to know me" format, where the reader learns more about where the insect lives, how they grow, what they eat, and what eats them.  If that seems a little graphic for a poetry book, it maintains the theme Lewis had through the book.  He doesn't sugar-coat the life and habits of the bugs in the book.

Photo of Kelly Murphy
drawing by: L. Propes

The museum exhibit begins on the front flap of the dust jacket, with a banner that welcomes you to the Face Bug Museum and gives you a preview of what you can expect once inside the doors of the museum.  The table of contents page continues the museum theme with a grand opening sign.  Murphy's drawings encapsulate all the trappings of a natural history museum: the atrium with lots of windows, a gift shop, fountain, and café; interactive activities with the exhibits; a hatchery; film; and live show.  Each poem represents a different part of the exhibit and museum, which helps give the book a sense of moving from one exhibit to another.  Murphy gives the insects moving through the museum little speech balloons that have a comment or two about that particular exhibit, which also contributes to the feeling of moving through a museum.  Murphy's drawings are one of the best things about the book.  They surround the poem and the photograph in such a way that it enhances the feel of a segment of the exhibit about that particular bug.  The visit to the museum ends, as it were, with a two page spread that shows the bug families enjoying the museum and its offerings, with a large banner that says "thank you" over the doors.  

The poems are typically Lewis -- bouncy and rhythmic, with lots of rhyme.  "Grand Opening: The Bug Face Museum" is a really good example of this.  It's composed of rhymed couplets, with a little alliteration thrown in.  It also sounds like the ringmaster of a circus, announcing the opening of the Bug Face Museum:

Climb through windows, walls, or basement, Insects, Spiders, guests.  It's free!
Our Smithsonian -- from Dragon-, Horse-, and Butterfly to Bee --
Is a hoppin', bug-eye poppin' photo show.  The place is packed!
We've installed designer lighting for the Moths it will attract. 

............................................................................................................................... 

No antennae on the photos, pests.  Just come and face your fear.
Drop whomever you are eating. Our Grand Opening is here! (Lewis 2013, 4)

At times, Lewis structures the poetry to resemble the activities of the subject of the poem.  In "Easter Carpenter Bee," he indents the lines of each stanza to resemble a bee burrowing into wood:

Who has made a hole in your house,
          A hole in your house?
                     That's me!
It's what I learned to do in school.
             You see, I'm a carpenter bee. (Lewis 2013, 8)

It's a method he also uses in "Pearl Crescent Butterfly" to illustrate the movement of a butterfly flitting from flower to flower to sip their nectar.

Sipping on a black-eyed Susan --
Any
     flower
                   nectars
                               ooze
                                         in
........................................................ 

If it's summer, here they come,
Females
     smaller
                   than
                                 a 

                                       thumb... (Lewis 2013, 12) 

Lewis' rhyme schemes are generally rhyming couplets or he rhymes every other line, which works most of the time, as in "Green Darner Dragonfly:"

Helicopter Dragonflyer
Stopping, starting rapid-fire.
He's the Emperor of the Pond,
Skimming lily pad and frond.
Day is sunny, but he's shady,
Spots a Darner Dragon Lady. (Lewis 2013, 22) 

There are other times when Lewis' rhymes don't quite work as well.  He has to manipulate the structure of the poem in order to make the rhyme fit, but it causes a hiccup between the seeing the words and trying to read them out loud.  In "Hickory Horned Devil," Lewis shifts a word to the next line in order to make his rhyme scheme work:

Look! A mini porcupine,
Country-colored coral reef
On an overhanging leaf,
Mother Nature's Frankenstein 

Nonchalantly eats his fill.
What if you were just a small
Caterpillar, one inch tall,
Who met this Devil dressed to kill? (Lewis 2013, 6)

If read aloud, it's fine, but the structure almost gets in the way of being able to read it the way it should be.  The space between the first and second stanza, quoted above, signals to the reader that they should pause, which is awkward.  Also, placing "caterpillar" on the line after the qualifying adjective of "small" also can signal an awkward line reading.  In "Nursery Web Spider," Lewis switches from rhyming couplets to an ABBA/CDDC structure for two stanzas, then back to the couplets.  It throws off the the rhythm of the rest of the poem, especially when reading aloud.

When the poem calls for it, Lewis is able to perfectly describe the subject.  In "Dogday Harvestfly Cicada," Lewis doesn't shy away from talking about how ugly this particular bug is.  (Yeah, it's that ugly...)  Describing the American Horse Fly as a Clydesdale (think the Budweiser horses) is a perfect way to succinctly describe just how big this insect is in relation to the others.  "Goldenrod Stowaway Moth" talks about how the bug uses its coloring to hide from swallows among goldenrod flowers.  Neat, huh?  And it's pretty golden hue gleams against the greenery.  After Lewis finishes talking about how lovely the bug is, he talks about how prickly it is: "But there are, oh, one hundred twenty / Things I would not dare do, / And one is touch a bristle on / That paintbrush of a hairdo!" (Lewis 2013, 17).  Just calling the bug's hairdo a paintbrush, it brings to mind the soft, yet bristly sensation you feel when you tap the ends of the bristles of a paintbrush.

Lewis uses a lot of personification in his poems, giving the bugs a personality or calling them by a name.  He allows the bugs to narrate their own poems, as in "Bush Katydid," where the Katydid is busily talking about his different names and how he appears to different things until he runs into a windshield with an almighty "splat" (Lewis 2013, 24).

The poems are fun to read, but in all honesty, they didn't really have a lasting impact on me.  Others might feel differently.  The poems are cute, and they're a great way to introduce insects, especially with younger students.  Lewis' poetry is always fun to read and he does a good job of describing the bugs and their habits in the poetry.  Most of the poems are quite fun to read, aside from a few where the rhyme scheme or rhythm gets a little awkward.  The inclusion of the bugs' Latin names is also a really great way to introduce the concept of binomial names to older students, and science teachers can use it as part of a lesson on biological classification.  The structure of the book as a museum exhibit gives it a natural progression from one bug to another, which would appeal to readers of all ages.  The photographs may not appeal to those of us who are on the squeamish side of the spectrum or feel that the only good bugs are the ones who stay on their side of the kitchen window.  Kids (and grownups) who love bugs and insects will adore the close up photographs of the bugs that are so gloriously detailed that you can see the expressions (as it were) on their tiny faces.  This would be a good addition to a school or classroom library or a children's collection of a public library.

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Spotlight on...

"Saddleback Caterpillar"

Sibine stimulea 

Though kids love him in Room 102,
There's a horrible hullabaloo
           When the substitute teacher
           Says, "Children, that creature
Belongs in a non-petting zoo. 

"He's handsome, he's graceful and cute,
But a bug in a mo' hair suit
            Can tenderly stroke you
            Or suddenly poke you --
A saddleback rash is a beaut!" (Lewis 2013, 28).

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After sharing this poem with a science class (reading and displaying the page through a document camera), students will be encouraged to create a museum exhibit using poetry, photographs, drawings, or other means to communicate the information they find about a particular animal or insect of their choice.  Students will need to include the Latin name as part of the exhibit, just like Lewis' poetry.  After the exhibit is complete, other classes will be encouraged to visit and perform a gallery walk, leaving comments on sticky notes provided for the purpose.

The class will work together to create the exhibit as a whole, but the students will work on their own or in small groups to create their portion of the exhibit.

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Works Cited

Lewis, J. Patrick. 2013. Face Bug. Photographs by Frederic B. Siskind. Illustrations by Kelly Murphy.  Honsdale, PA: WordSong.

'Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse" by J. Patrick Lewis & Jane Yolen (LS 5663)

Lewis, J. Patrick and Jane Yolen. 2011. Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.

ISBN: 987-1-56846-211-0

Cover image from:
www.janeyolen.com

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk in Russia in 1887.  His parents were solidly working-class, but young Marc wanted to become an artist. He studied painting in St. Petersburg, and then apprenticed to another painter and scene designer when he met Bella, who would become his wife.  He moved to Paris to study painting.  He was living in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, but eventually managed to obtain visas for his young family to leave Russia; and they moved to Paris, where they lived until the Nazi regime invaded France.  Chagall, who was Jewish, fled France, and settled in New York City for several years, returning to France after World War II ended.  Sadly, his beloved wife, Bella, had died in New York in 1944.  Chagall continued to paint, draw, and in the latter part of his career, design stained glass.  He died in Paris in 1985, at the age of 97.

It's not hard to recognize Chagall's distinctive style of painting.  It's an entrancing combination of hard and soft edges, blended colors, rich hues, and whimsical, musically talented animals, generally goats.  In fact, one of my favorite paintings is his La Mariée, known to most people as the print in Hugh Grant's kitchen in the film Notting Hill.  La Mariée doesn't make an appearance in J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen's Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse, but many of his other paintings appear to create illustrations with the poems that briefly, but richly describe Chagall's eventful life or narrate his paintings.  His paintings are poetry, but a poetry that utilizes images instead of words, so it makes sense to pair his paintings with poetry.  J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen partner together to create a lyrical biography of Marc Chagall and his artwork.

Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers contains fourteen poems that share a title with the accompanying painting.  Yolen and Lewis each wrote seven of the poems, beginning with Chagall's birth ("Maternity") and ending with the elegiac "The Fall of Icarus."  Each poem/painting combination also has a brief bit of biographical information that corresponds to the time period in the poem.  The name of the poet who wrote the particular poem appears in rather small font, perpendicular and to the left of the actual poem, which also helps to steer the focus of the reader to the poem itself and not the particular author.  Each painting has a caption with the title of the painting; the year Chagall painted it; its size; and the name of the museum or person who owns it.  There are also a few photographs of Chagall, usually with his wife in the book.  It also contains footnotes to explain some of the Hebrew or Yiddish words that appear in the poems or a particular Jewish tradition.  Their location at the end of each page is ideal, so a reader's eyes flick quickly down to the bottom to find the information, then they can go right back into the poem without missing a beat.  The book's layout follow s a regular pattern: the poem on the left side of a two-page spread, with the reproduction of the painting on the right.  The pages themselves are lovely -- the heavy, glossy paper one usually sees in heavy books that contain reproductions of famous works of art.  Yolen and Lewis also include a list of sources at the end of the book.  Two of them are memoirs written by both Bella and Marc.  Yolen and Lewis both weave Bella and Marc's own words into their poems, giving them a level of immediacy and intimacy that draws you into their world.

Why name the book after the painting Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers?  In Yiddish, (as Lewis and Yolen note) to do something well, with a level of finesse and expertise,  is to do it with seven fingers. Did Chagall paint with seven fingers?  I would definitely say so.

Lewis and Yolen have much different styles of poetry.  Yolen tends to write in a more flexible, free-verse style, while Lewis' poems generally have a distinct rhythm and rhyme scheme.  Lewis uses rhyme to help create a mannered rhythm in his poems, especially in "I and the Village" and "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers."  "I and the Village" uses a series of rhymed couplets, while "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers" contains four stanzas, each with four lines.  The outer lines of each stanza rhyme, and the inner lines rhyme like this: "Today I make a work of art, / A red-and-orange wonderland, / By seven-fingered sleight of hand -- / Let ambiguity play a part" (Lewis 2011, 24).  The combination of the symmetry of the poem (four lines, four stanzas) is juxtaposed next to the Cubist, but still fluid painting, "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers."  Lewis also wrote the bouncy "Over Vitebsk," which reflects Chagall's nine or ten year old self, looking back at his first forays into art.  One of Lewis' (2011) poems, "The Promenade," employs personification, describing Paris as the "patron saint of color" (26).  Perhaps the best use of personification in this poem is how Lewis (2011) describes New York as a woman with secrets and a history, hidden underneath the glitzy costumes and makeup: "New York, kaleidoscope of the world, red and / amber carnival of the senses, dares anyone to find / the gritty soul beneath her glitter petticoats" (26).

Yolen's verse veers more toward the poignant, emotional soul of Chagall and his paintings.  She incorporates a quote from Bella that describes her first meeting with Chagall in "My Fiancée in Black Gloves:" "his eyes, /... so blue as the sky, / and oblong, like almonds" (Yolen 2011, 15).  Yolen writes her poem to compliment Bella's words and capture the feeling of exuberant joy.  In it, she alludes to Chagall's future eclipse over his master by calling him "a sun over Bakst's pale moon" (Yolen 2011, 15).  Yolen (2011) uses Chagall's painting "Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine" to imagine how Bella was able to keep the family's life running smoothly, allowing Marc to create his "scribbles full of color and love" (20).  Yolen (2011) imagines Marc saying of Bella, "she could tote us like an old rag peddler / bent double with his heavy sacks... / never feeling the weight" (20).  In those few phrases, Yolen is able to convey how Chagall must have felt about his wife and the way she supported and inspired his need to paint and draw.  It's a sentiment paralleled in "Autoportrait" that details Chagall's life with his second wife, Vava, who (according to the biographical information that accompanies the poem) helped Chagall find a renewed zest for painting that seemed to have been lost when Bella died.  Yolen (2011) writes, "I take off my hat to you, Vava, / and my heart, / that stopped beating after Bella's death. / Only promise not to straighten my studio / where clutter feeds the artist's life" (34).

Perhaps the most poignant of the Yolen poems is "The Flying Horse," which describes how Chagall and his family fled Paris after the Nazi invasion, carrying the memory of the men, women, and children left behind in the camps; the artwork they had to leave behind; and the city of Paris itself.  Yolen (2011) gently alludes to Bella's imminent death, by saying, "But Death, that old leveller, / can find you wherever you go" (31).  Even though the family escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, Death could still find them, even an ocean away in New York.  In the poems where they refer to God, the authors even follow the traditional Jewish convention of writing it as "G-d."  (In more traditional Jewish communities, it is seen as disrespectful to write out the name of God.)

The book is neatly bookended by Chagall's birth and his forays into designing and making stained glass windows, an art form he didn't begin to pursue until he was over seventy years old.  The final poem, however, is an interpretation of Chagall's painting, "The Fall of Icarus," completed when he was nearly ninety.  Rather than paint Icarus falling into the sea, as is commonly told through legend, Chagall depicted Icarus falling to the middle of a field, surrounded on one side by people genuinely distressed at his passing, and on the other by people reveling in their schadenfreude.  While Lewis doesn't come out and say so, one can surmise that he views the painting as a commentary of all that Chagall had viewed and experienced during his long life.  It serves to summarize the whole of Chagall's rather eventful life.  Through his art, Chagall experienced the greatest heights of what humanity can offer the world, but he also experienced worst.

This book should appeal to secondary grade students and some middle grade students.  While the format might make people think of it as a picture book, and mistakenly label it as a piece of juvenilia, the combination of poetry and art analysis might be a bit advanced for younger students.  It isn't that I feel that younger students can't understand it.  I think they might enjoy some of the poetry, or have insights to the artwork that aren't apparent to adults.  It might be a work they won't fully appreciate until they are older, with a little more life experience under their belt.  It would make a great addition to an art or art history class library or a Judaica class that studies significant Jewish figures.

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Spotlight on...

"The Violinist"

Oh, Uncle, play me a communion,
on your kishefdik violin
as you dance in the big boots on the rooftop.
Let me sway with you in shoes of fire
on the streets of Lyozno, Ekaterinoslav, Vitebsk,
and in all the little shtetls where men dance together
and women envy our excesses.
There is something heroic about that dance,
every one of us making our way in song
up the long road to the throne of G-d.

kishefdik: Yiddish for "magical" or "charmed by a magic spell"
shtetls: Jewish villages, often those just outside of big towns
G-d: the way some observant Jews spell the Lord's name (Yolen 2011, 12).

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I was intrigued by the concept of using poetry to create a biography of an artist by interpreting their paintings.  After sharing the poem and the painting with an art class, the students would work individually or in small groups to choose an artist, select a painting or two, then write a poem that either interprets the painting, tells a story about what's going on in the painting, or reflects a moment in the artist's life.  They can incorporate the poem into the painting by deconstructing the pairing and making a collage with the painting and the poem.

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Works Cited

Lewis, J. Patrick and Jane Yolen. 2011. Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.

'Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village' by Laura Amy Schlitz, Illustrated by Robert Byrd (LS 5663)

Schlitz, Laura Amy. 2007. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village. Illustrated by Robert Byrd. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

ISBN: 978-0-7636-5094-0

Cover image from
Candlewick Press

Ever wonder what it was like to live in the Middle Ages?  It seems so romantic, if you believe the covers of novels in a certain genre that shall remain nameless.  Laura Amy Schlitz dispels any such notions in a series of twenty-one interconnected poems written from the perspective of different levels of society in a thirteenth century English village in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village.  She came up with the concept for the book while students in a Baltimore school were studying the Middle Ages (Schlitz 2007, 96).  Schiltz (2007) comments, "I wanted them to have something to perform, but no one wanted a small part.  So I decided to write several monologues instead of one long play" (96).  Schlitz revels in the Middle Ages in all their gritty, filthy, socially stratified glory through everyone from the lord of the manor's children to villeins, or peasants who were little more than slaves.  In fact, the majority of the poems give a voice to marginalized members of medieval society, who, let's be honest, made up a majority of population during the Middle Ages.  The poems, written as monologues, put a human face on the distant past, which can help children make a connection between their lives and the lives of their medieval peers, not to mention how much things have changed.

By and large, the poems are meant for a single voice, but there are two poems that were written for two characters.  They do not engage in dialogue, but reveal their inner thoughts to the audience in a pas de deux where the words join and separate as the characters' ideas mesh and then diverge.  It's used with a particularly poignant effect in "Jacob ben Salomon the Moneylender's Son and Petronella the Merchant's Daughter."  Jacob, a young Jewish man, and Petronella have much more in common than they both realize.  They've been brought up with similar values and allegiances to their families and respective faiths, and to view one another with the same suspicions, and yet... If all the social and religious roadblocks weren't there, Schlitz demonstrates that Jacob and Petronella might have been good friends in another time and place.  The other, "Mariot and Maude the Glassblower's Daughters," find two young girls faced with the prospect of marrying their father's apprentice.  To one of the daughters, it's a fate worse than death, but the other doesn't find it such a terrible idea.  The other poems are essentially meditations on their situation in life, their dreams for the future, and the hard, cold reality that defines every aspect of their existence.  This is excellently drawn in "Barbary the Mudslinger."  After she seethes with jealousy over the visible wealth and ease displayed by the lord's daughter, Barbary succinctly sums up how their futures aren't so far apart in the end:

It made me think
        how all women are the same --
        silk or sackcloth, all the same.
               There's always babies to the born
                      and suckled and wiped,
                      and worried over.
        Isobel, the lord's daughter,
               will have to be married,
               and squat in the straw,
               and scream with the pain
               and pray for her life
                      same as me. (Schlitz 2007, 49)

Barbary's language is quite exaggerated, but it effectively places the direness of her family's situation into context.  She describes her reaction upon learning her stepmother is going to have another baby after a difficult previous pregnancy and delivery as, "I stood there / with my jar almost touching my knees" (Schlitz 2007, 46).   Barbary, covered in mud, muck, and baby poo, sees Isobel walking down the street with "her hair... combed, sleek as an otter. / Her veil was snow white... Her lips were curved, / like the smile of a cat" (Schlitz 2007, 47).  The figurative language serves to set Isobel apart from Barbary -- the smooth hair and spotless veil are enough to set Barbary's teeth on edge, but the cat-like smirk is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.  Barbary's plain, yet descriptive, language to describe her own situation is quite eloquent with its many words and phrases to depict various forms of filth, so when Barbary has to tell the audience about Isobel, she needs a different way to shape the words so the audience knows that Isobel seems a little larger than life in Barbary's mind.  Most of the poems don't have a distinct rhyme scheme, but "Thomas the Doctor's Son" is composed in rhyming couplets.  With lines like, "I know the stars and movements planetary. / With one whiff, I can sniff out dysentery" combined with the audible rhymes, Schlitz (2007) makes Thomas sound like a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical (18).  This isn't a bad thing, and the rhymes give the monologue a bit of a self-important air.  The poem "Otho the Miller's Son" contains a repetitive portion of a stanza that reads, "Oh, God makes the water, and the water makes the river, / And the river turns the mill wheel / and the wheel goes on forever" (Schlitz 2007, 27).  It neatly illustrates the medieval view that one's lot in life is determined by God.

Three of the monologues are written as prose: "Nelly the Sniggler," "Pask the Runaway," and "Will the Plowboy."  That being said, the prose pieces do have a poetic rhythm that belie their structure.  If you heard them read aloud, you could be excused for thinking they're poems.  So it's puzzling to me why Schlitz chose to write them this way.  The characters aren't from the same social sphere, and Schlitz doesn't match a specific poetic form to the character's social class in the other poems.  Nelly, Pask, and Will don't have interactions with one another.  The solid blocks of text feel and look out of place among the nineteen other poems.

Structurally, the poems give the person performing them ample opportunity to insert pauses for dramatic or comic effect, as shown in "Jack the Half-Wit."

Lack-a wit
        Numskull
              Mooncalf
                     Fool.
That's what they call me.
That's what they yell in the village
         when I walk through. (Schlitz 2007, 30)

The indentations on the lines can signal to the reader that they should take a pause before speaking the next line.  In "Jack the Half-Wit," the pauses let the insults sink into the audience, allowing each one to float in its own line.  Many of the poems exhibit a similar structure.  The poems written for two voices, lines where the readers are supposed to say a line in unison are printed in italics.

Schlitz includes a bibliographic list, as well as a table of contents.  She also includes endnotes to explain some of the more archaic terms or concepts.  It's a great feature, but its placement makes it difficult to use.  Had Schlitz included them at the end of the poem or as footnotes, it would have allowed the reader to take a quick peek, then move on.  By placing them at the end, the reader has to flip to the back, find the endnotes for the particular poem, then flip back to the poem itself.  It gets a little tedious, even for an adult.  Schlitz doesn't just use poetry to illustrate the Middle Ages.  She also includes blurbs about things like the Crusades, the treatment of Jews, medieval farming practices, and pilgrimages.  They give the poems they follow a little more depth of knowledge.  Candlewick Press also has a teacher's guide that allows you to do a reader's theatre or explore the characters and society in more depth.

Robert Byrd's woodcut like illustrations provide a couple of things.  One, each poem has a small illustration of each character.  He does a more expanded illustration for each of Schlitz's background blurbs.  My particular copy had illustrations rendered in black-and-white, but there is a full-color version.  After seeing images of the full-color version, I would recommend the full-color version.  The details tend to fade a bit in the black-and-white.  The illustrations are appropriate, and the best one is a map of the village that has tiny figures of each of the characters in the poems where they live and/or work in the village.  It provides great context.

I'm not entirely certain that the poems will appeal to a wide variety of children.  As Sylvia Vardell (2008) stated in Children's Literature in Action, "Historical fiction may be one of the most difficult genres to promote... For many children [history is] as strange and hard to understand as fantasy, only boring.  To them, the distant past feels has remote as a make-believe future" (175).  And this is historical fiction through and through.  Had this been published when I was in middle school, I would have devoured it in a heartbeat, but then again, I was a huge fan of historical fiction, and I still am.  However, many students might be turned off by the combination of poetry and historical fiction, and if a teacher or librarian wants to encourage students to try Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, it will require careful marketing.  Don't get me wrong, the poems are interesting, and what they reveal about  how people lived in the Middle Ages is fascinating.  If someone teaches social studies, and approaches it from a humanities standpoint, then it's an excellent resources, especially for middle grades.  In British Columbia, the Grade 8 social studies curriculum contains the Middle Ages, and this would be a perfect addition to the library and to the teacher's classroom libraries, as well.  It works well as a supplement to a textbook, if the teacher routinely uses a textbook.

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Spotlight on...

"Edgar the Falconer's Son" 

'Twas I who stole thee, two years hence,
Climbed to the heights with many a qualm,
Scooped thee from they mother's nest.
I felt thy heart beat 'gainst my palm.
I was the one who filled thy crop --
I fed thee, stroked thee, day and night.
Thou wast my captive and my child --
All savageness and appetite. 

And it was I who gentled thee.
I was the one who drew the thread
That seeled thy eyelids. And for thee
I hungered and forsook my bed.
Long in the night I walked the floor,
Carrying thee upon my glove.
I fed thee dainties -- mice and eels,
Adder skin and heart of dove. (Schlitz 2007, 38-39)

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One of the more fun things about history is to find out the kinds of jobs people did.  Some of them truly belonged on Mike Rowe's television show Dirty Jobs.  After sharing "Edgar the Falconer's Son" with the class, students can choose one off a list of medieval-era jobs and research them.  They will then collaborate in small groups (no more than five) with their classmates to make their own version of Dirty Jobs.  They can use moviemaking software, like iMovie, to edit and polish their program.  They students will have to create costumes (or costume pieces) and props that will appear in their video.  The jobs list will come from Archers, Alchemists, and 98 Other Medieval Jobs You Might Have Loved Or Loathed by Priscilla Galloway.

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Works Cited

Schlitz, Laura Amy. 2007. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village. Illustrated by Robert Byrd. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

Vardell, Sylvia M. 2008. Children's Literature in Action. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

"A Pond Full of Ink" by Annie M. G. Schmidt, Illustrated by Sieb Posthuma, Translated by David Colmer (LS 5663)

Schmidt, Annie M. G. 2014. A Pond Full of Ink. Illustrated by Sieb Posthuma.  Translated by David Colmer. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers.

ISBN: 978-0-8028-5433-9

Book cover
Photo by: L. Propes

Annie M. G. Schmidt is a highly regarded poet in the Netherlands.  Unfortunately, she isn't very well known in the United States.  A new edition of her collection of poems, A Pond Full of Ink could hopefully make her a more familiar presence in classroom and school libraries.  The bouncy rhythms,  imaginative, off-kilter narratives, and whimsical drawings will appeal to fans of Shel Silverstein.  In fact, readers' only regret might be that A Pond Full of Ink isn't longer!

The eleven poems in A Pond Full of Ink run the gamut from talking about how a fairy tale author writes his tales, using a pond full of black ink to fill his pen to Aunty Jo and the deer that has taken up residence on her living room sofa.  (On a side note: it might be an interesting exercise for students to see how fountain pens work, as it might help them imagine someone going to a pond of ink to fill a pen each day.)  Some, like "Belinda Hated Getting Clean..." is a close cousin to Silverstein's "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout", neither of whom enjoyed a sense of personal hygiene.  Schmidt even gives a nod to young children, and their desire to do what they want, as opposed to what the adults want in "Nice and Naughty."  She engages the imagination, by asking readers to empathize with a trio of elderly otters whose wish to boats in the river is thwarted because otters are simply not allowed or by putting a Toy Story-esque twist on furniture, imagining where the furniture might want to go when everyone has left the house (Schmidt 2014, 5; 13).  Schmidt also writes a sly observation of the way salacious gossip doesn't always match mundane reality in "Brian Brink."

Schmidt crafts the poetry with a definitive rhythm, generally with the metrical foot pattern in trochee, but I wouldn't make too much of that when reading and sharing the poetry with students.  I only mention it here because the rhythmic structure is so strong in the poetry, that you can't help but notice it.  Just to illustrate the point, here's an excerpt from "Aunt Sue and Uncle Steve:"

Detail of extended illustration
of "Aunt Sue and Uncle Steve"
Photo by: L. Propes

They sleep up there and eat up there,
it's very cozy, in the air,
except when storms are blowing.
It's quiet, large, and very green,
but Aunt sue isn't really keen --
she hates a house that's growing. 

She's never really worked out how
to park a stroller on a bough.
It leaves her very troubled.
And now the kids are getting big,
she's scared they'll slip on leaf or twig,
and all her fears have doubled. (Schmidt 2014, 16)

Two-Page Spread
Photo by: L. Propes

Schmidt also uses a great deal of rhyming couplets, as you can see in the excerpt from "Aunt Sue and Uncle Steve."  The rhyme scheme also pairs well with the rhythm, as it tends to emphasize the rhythm of the poetry.  It never gets tedious, because Schmidt is careful to not repeat a single sound too often when rhyming.  (In many cases, the rhyme structure looks like this: A, A, B, B, C, C, D, D... etc.)  There are times where Schmidt does report a rhyme scheme, but it does not happen often, and it's hardly noticeable.  Each poem also has a definite narrative structure, which makes it ideal for activities like readers' theatre or choral readings.  The poems become small stories, where sometimes fantastical events occur, such when a group of robbers who have been so successful, there is nothing left for them to steal, except the moon ("The Robbers and the Moon").  A reader can see a clear beginning, middle, and end in "The Robbers and the Moon," as well as a distinct climax.  Many of the poems in this book would serve as a great introduction to plot structure.

Sieb Posthuma's brightly-hued color illustrations have a vintage feel about them, and they look as if they came from a different era.  The brilliantly encapsulate the theme of each individual poem over a two-page spread with the poem generally appearing on one of the pages, if not spread over both pages.  Some of the drawings can't be confined to a single two-page spread, and an additional drawing appears on another two-page spread.  Often they serve to expand on the theme of the initial drawing.  The illustrations exhibit the same sort of whimsy that appears in the poetry.  In the aforementioned "Belinda Hated Getting Clean...," the following pages depict what happened to Belinda after the events detailed in the poem.  Half of the fun of the poem "Aunty Jo" is the illustration that shows a polite, demure deer perched on a sofa with all manner of things suspended from his antlers.  

Detail of one of Posthuma's illustrations
Photo by: L. Propes

One of the best features about the book are the endpapers.  They show the gentleman who writes fairy tales, mentioned in the first poem of the collection.  He's used his pen and the pond of ink to write an 'A' at the top of the pages.  At the end, there is, of course, the same gentleman with his pen, admiring the letter 'Z.'  Other such nods to the idea of a writer using a pond full of ink to pen his tales exist on the title page, where a series of drops of ink splatter their way across the title page verso and the title page itself.  We also revisit the writer at the end of the book where he's finished for the day, snoozing in a hammock, the pen at rest, and a piece of paper with the word "End" dangles from his fingers.  That pond of ink? It's dry, save for a few random puddles of ink.  All of those illustrations are thoughtful additions to the overall structure of the book.  They help introduce and conclude the work, even one as short as this one.

Like several of the poetry books I've reviewed, there are no access features: no table of contents, or index of the first lines or titles and no page numbers.  As with the others, it does make it a bit difficult to find the exact poem at a moment's notice.  This is probably an instance where the brevity of the book is an advantage.

This is absolutely a fine addition to any school, classroom, or public library, especially if you have fans of Shel Silverstein clamoring for something new to enjoy.

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Spotlight on...

"Three Elderly Otters"
Three elderly otters longed to go boating
out on the river,
out on the moat.
For years, they had wished they could be
      out there floating,
but being otters, they could help voting
signs on the seats of every last boat.
Written by renters, the miserable rotters,
they said...
FORBIDDEN FOR OTTERS 

Three elderly otters standing there crying
there by the river,
there by the moat.
Crying and weeping and finally sighing,
"Maybe the train is fun and worth trying."
But stuck in each window the spied a small note
that had them howling with their heads bowed.
It said...

Detail of one of the elderly otters
Photo by: L. Propes

OTTERS NOT ALLOWED 

Three elderly otters, tired and spent,
leaving the river
and the moat far behind,
saw in a meadow next to a tent
a big row of bicycles ready to rent,
and hung from each handlebar was a small sign
that made their day, and what did it say?
It said...
OTTERS DON'T NEED TO PAY 

Now the otters ride over the dike,
over the dike and back on their bikes. (Schmidt 2014, 5-6)

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This is a great poem to introduce the concept of personification to students.  After sharing the poem with students, the class can create a graphic organizer or the different human qualities displayed by the otters.  The class can then create a list of different animals and human actions, emotions, or characteristics.  The students, either solo or in pairs, will create a short poem or illustration/collage that depicts the animal with its humanistic qualities.  The students will post their products on the walls, and the class will perform a gallery walk, leaving comments and/or constructive criticism on their peers' work using sticky notes.

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Works Cited


Schmidt, Annie M. G. (2014). A Pond Full of Ink. Illustrated by Sieb Posthuma.  Translated by David Colmer. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers.