Franco, Betsy.
2009. Messing Around on the Monkey Bars
and Other School Poems for Two Voices. Ill. by Jessie Hartland.
Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. ISBN 978-0-7636-3174-1
Plot Summary:
Messing Around on the Monkey Bars is a picture-book poetry collection by one
author, Betsy Franco, who has published more than 80 books. The theme of the
book revolves around the routine of an elementary school day, from riding the
bus in the morning, classroom activities, recess, lunch and finally, to the
final bell as the school day ends.
Though the rhyming poems can be read silently by one person, or aloud to
an audience, the author has written the book in such a way to be enjoyed by two
voices reading aloud and alternating parts of the poems.
Critical Analysis:
Franco’s book is a
delightful journey through a typical school day for children, with the poems
arranged to take you from the morning bus ride to the final bell, and all the
school activities in between. All of the
poems rhyme, some every other line, others every fourth, creating meter and a
rhythmic reading experience, with spare arrangement of words on the page. None of the poems cause you to pause and
question the word choice, or appear to be forced. The poems describe events,
conversations, places and actions, using words that make us feel like we are in
school ourselves, getting through our day.
What stands out in
this volume in many of the poems is the author’s playful tone and the use of
descriptive sounds to describe objects, actions and events. The bus anthropomorphically snorts and
squeals, screeches and coughs as it picks up the children. Students in the library “snicker, snicker,
ouch, eek, burp, snort, and tee-hee,” instead of reading quietly. A girl’s pencil tap, tap, taps on her desk
until all the children are “bopping, hopping, snapping, clapping, drumming,
thumping and tappity-tapping,” representing a strong use of consonance. And a classroom comes alive using with the author’s
use of onomatopoeia in the whir of a fan, the zap of a rubber band, the
thud/bonk of a book, and the “grrr” of a pencil sharpener.
Hartland’s
illustrations are colorful and childlike, appearing as if drawn and painted by children,
which compliments the school-age feel of the book. Most of the drawings express
movement of the characters symbolizing the fidgety mannerisms of school
children, and the passing of time throughout the school day. A line-up after
recess shows children racing as they “bunch up and bump, wiggle, giggle, trip,
tease, push, pull, jab, grab, poke, pinch, squish and squeeze” to get to the
front of the line. Added details across the page delight the eye, such as various
school accessories like pencils, calculators, paper with writing, open picture
books and children’s artwork. In one poem, “Anatomy Class,” the author uses
anthropomorphic references to classroom objects, such as chair arms, kite
tails, book spines, shoe tongues, clock faces and tack heads. Hartland illustrates these objects with human-like
faces and appendages, causing the reader to look at typical classroom
accoutrements in a new and fresh way. The illustrator has successfully matched
the drawings on each page to the author’s words, giving the poems unique visual
imagery along with the sensory imagery from Franco’s word choices.
Reference aids compliment
the arrangement of the book and include a table of contents, an author’s note
about using two voices to read the poems aloud, and an addition at the end of
the book describing adventurous ways to read the poems.
Reviews and Awards:
Best Book of the
Year, 2010. Bank Street College of
Education; KC3 Book Award Nominee, 2011-2012.
“Though readers could tackle the poems alone,
differences in typeface cue the possibility for two readers to share the poems
aloud in Joyful Noise fashion, alternating lines and sharing others in a
clever script that reflects children's school-day experiences. Hartland's energetic gouache illustrations
adopt a naive style that matches the playful spirit of the text while serving
as a splendid complement to its evocation of children's voices. This book gets
high marks.”– Kirkus Reviews
“There's plenty of univocal poetry for young people,
but it's still rare to find a volume geared to shared readings, and established
author Franco provides a useful addition to the genre.” – The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Connections:
School-themed books abound, and this poetry
collection could be used in conjunction with other picture books for a
story-time about school activities. It
could also be used with a unit on figurative language as an example of the use
of anthropomorphism and onomatopoeia, and children could be encouraged to write
their own versions of school sounds and personification of classroom objects. Finally, the choral reading aspect of the
book would make it a fun activity to break up the pressure of more intense school
work.
Personal Response:
This is the first
poem picture book I have read in many years, and I enjoyed experiencing the
arrangement of the poetry to reflect the chronological activities of a school
day. The descriptive language of the
author abounds, as she uses copious adjectives and a plethora of sounds that
bring back memories of school days gone by.
References
Children’s
Literature Comprehensive Database. N.d. Messing
Around on the Monkey Bars by Betsy Franco. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:4529/index.php/bookdetail/index?page=1&pos=0&isbn=9780763631741
(accessed October 1, 2013).
Sidman, Joyce. 2007.
This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and
Forgiveness. Ill. By Pamela Zagarenski. Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin
Company. ISBN 978-0-618-61680-0
Plot Summary:
Critical Analysis:
After reading all
of the poems of apology and forgiveness in this short poetry collection, I can
see why it won so much acclaim. They are
not typical poems of rhyme and rhythm, though there is a pantoum, a haiku, and
a choral read poem in the mix. Most of the poems are in free verse form. The power
from the poems comes from reading the apology and response together. The boy who stole the donuts from the
teacher’s lounge finds out he is stealing their hearts, too, and they still
care for him. The girl who rubs the nose
of the statue of Florence P. Scribner before each spelling test for luck finds
out the statue enjoys the warmth of the girl’s hand on her cold nose. The boy who writes of having to euthanize his
beloved dog is comforted by the response from the school janitor about his own
such experience when he says that the dying dog “was smelling you, feeling your
touch. You were loving him, and he was loving you back. That’s how he went and that’s how a dog
should go.”
School crushes,
hurt feelings, insults regretted, unbeknownst offences, disappointments and
guilt are all explored in these poems, mostly written like regular narrative
broken up in free verse. The words of the poems are typically aligned at the
left margin of the page, though there are some that have more creative
indentions to reflect movement. Figurative language is used in phrases such as
the simile in “the silence seemed like a hundred crushing elephants” and personification
as the brownie pan “gaped like an accusing eye.” We see symbolic imagery such as one student
“wading into the river of forgiveness,” and visual and sensory imagery is used
to describe an accidentally broken window: “…the weight of the gritty rocks/the shiver of
tinkling glass, the wild joy blooming in my chest/ the fear, the running away.”
Reference aids include
a table of contents for Part 1 (apologies) and Part 2 (responses), and an
“imagined” introduction by a sixth grade boy explaining that the apology poems
were created for a sixth grade class.
Zagarenski’s
artistic use of mixed media in the illustrations cleverly compliments Franco’s
collection of poems. She uses a
combination of painterly techniques, such as charcoal and color filled pen and
ink, along with graphic techniques, such as photos of notebook paper and a
printed collage taken from a dictionary definition of the word “apology,” which
is seen in the some of the characters’ clothing. The illustrated faces of the characters in
the book reflect the various emotions felt by the students in their apologies:
sorrow, slyness, anger, surprise, satisfaction and guilt, to name a few. Many of the drawings reflect movement on the
page, symbolizing that an apology should be an active, not passive, experience.
Reviews and Awards:
Best
Book:
Best
Children's Books of the Year, 2008 ; Bank Street College of Education ;
Outstanding MeritChoices, 2008 ; Cooperative Children's Book Center
School Library Journal Best Books, 2007
School Library Journal Book Review Stars, May 2007
Teachers' Choices, 2008 ; International Reading Association
Awards,
Honors and Prizes:
Claudia
Lewis Award, 2008 Winner United States
Cybil Award, 2007 Winner Poetry United States
Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, 2008 Honor Book United States
Cybil Award, 2007 Winner Poetry United States
Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, 2008 Honor Book United States
Texas Bluebonnet Award, 2008-2009; Masterlist
Reviews:
“Joyce Sidman's wonderfully imagined collection is
full of humor and tenderness, expressed in poems that offer brief yet exacting
portraits of the diverse children she's created, as well as glimpses into their
lives”. – CCBC (Cooperative Children’s
Book Center Choices
“Packed with the intensity of everyday pain and
sorrow, kids and adults exchange the words that convey grief, delight, love and
acceptance of themselves and others.” –Kirkus
Reviews
Connections:
This book could be read with the more
light-hearted Forgive
me, I Meant to Do It by Gail Carson Levine
during a unit on poetry. Children could
try their hand, as the characters in Sidman’s book do, at writing a poem of
apology to someone in their life, and requesting a reply. A story-time unit
could be created for younger children which includes a group discussion about
what it means to apologize, and then be forgiven.
Personal Response:
One negative aspect
of this book of poetry is the arrangement of the apology poems and the
forgiveness poems in two separate sections, which causes the reader to have to
shuffle back and forth to gain the full experience of the conflict and
resolution. It would have been more
impactful to have them on facing pages, though I am sure that some thought did
go into the arrangement of the poems by the author or publisher. In addition, the introduction causes some
confusion (to this novice poetry reader) because the reader has no way of
knowing these are not really the writings of a student class, unless one reads
the author information on the back flap of the book! I suppose this indicates
that the author did a great job of writing her poems in a style that reflects
the adolescent dialect.
References
Children’s
Literature Comprehensive Database. N.d. This
is Just to Say by Joyce Sidman. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:4529/index.php/bookdetail/index?page=1&pos=1&isbn=9780618616800 (accessed October 3, 2013).
Wikipedia. N.d. This is Just to Say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Just_To_Say (accessed October 3, 2013).
Hemphill,
Stephanie. 2007. Your Own, Sylvia: a
verse portrait of Sylvia Plath. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN
978-0-375-83799-9
Plot Summary:
Stephanie Hemphill
has written a mesmerizing fictional verse novel interpreting the life of Sylvia
Plath, but it is grounded in a great deal of research. The author used actual published biographies,
letters, journals and Plath’s poetry itself to construct the poems in her book
which tell the story of Plath’s life from her birth through her death by
suicide at the age of 31. The poems are
written in the voices of family members, neighbors, friends, colleagues and
doctors, and through those voices the reader witnesses the life of a talented,
driven and at times, emotional unstable, poet whose work influenced a
generation.
Critical Analysis:
“She could not help
burning herself/from the inside out,/Consuming herself/Like the sun…She could
not know how long/Her luminary would map the sky,/ Or where her dying would
lead the lost.”
In an ambitious undertaking, author Stephanie
Hemphill has written a book of history and character, imagining the life of
Sylvia Plath through verse poems written from the perspective and voices of the
people who orbited the poet throughout her short life. From her mother’s love, her father’s
indifference, her neighbors’ and friends’ affection, her teachers’ acclamations,
her lovers’ attractions to her husband’s love, obsession and ultimate betrayal,
we come to know Plath’s struggle with abandonment, perfectionism, identity, her
art and her heart through Hemphill’s thoroughly researched and vividly
portrayed writings.
The author places a
poem on each page, with a title, the name of person “writing” the poem, the
date, and a footnote with historical information that helps the reader better
understand the content of the poem. The
author also re-imagines some of Plath’s own poems throughout the book, and has
managed to capture the poet’s confessional style and unique voice. In “The
Arrival of Poetry,” Hemphill writes a poem describing Plath’s most prolific
month of writing in 1962: “….she cannot /Stop her pen writing./ Her words
arrive, a box to be opened./…She feels like a medium./She catches lines like a
sieve./She slices a vein and poetry flows,/Blood dark, blood dirty,/A river
into Hades.”
Though most poems
are in non-rhyming verse form, there are examples of a villanelle in “Why she
Writes,” something similar to a pantoum, where words, instead of phrases are
repeated in subsequent lines, in “August, 1953,” and the very creative
“Abcedarian” in which each line of the poem begins with a letter from the alphabet,
from A-Z.
The most profound
aspect of this book is the author’s use of descriptive language and sensory imagery
in her writings and the emotional impact they leave on the reader. The writing seems at times almost "cinematic in style, as a succession of scenes are presented to the visual imagination with the voice-over heard simultaneously in the mind" (Alexander 2005). In
“Crocketteer,” a poem from the perspective of Plath’s high school English
teacher, Hemphill writes metaphorically that Sylvia “radiates, uranium strong…[her] wings are
luminous and large, her name will be known…[she] sculpts poems out of
air.” In “August, 1953,” the author
writes a poem, again using metaphors, about Sylvia’s depression, electroshock treatment and first
suicide attempt: “Her summer is a winter -/…Her wintering is a glass bell
-/frozen crystal tongue without tingle/without chime./Her glass bell suffocates
fireflies, honeybees,/Jars them in heat, turns off their little minds./Her
fireflies must be shocked, relit./Depression oozes from her fingers, softens
her brain.” Sylvia is described, using similes, in one
poem by an acquaintance like “a woman possessed by demons and angels, a muse to herself…Her
voice like the pied piper, raw and wicked, draws me in.”
Hemphill ends her
last poem with the descriptive and figurative lines, “But for those who gaze heavenly/Or into the
reflected pool of night,/She is fuel. She is dust. She is a guiding star.” The author has taken us on a deeply emotional
journey through Plath’s life, with vivid and evocative words, and leaves us
both satisfied and disturbed.
Reference aids
include footnotes to each poem, which help explain its context, some black and
white photographs of the poet with family and friends, a “dear reader” section
where the author includes background information on how and why she wrote the
book, and source notes of all the research done in constructing the book.
From the first
poem, “Owning Sylvia Plath” by a “reader,” all the way through to Hemphill’s
final statement -“Sylvia was given the night sky’s brilliance so her writing
can be a light for all of us,” - the author has created a book that has a huge
emotional impact and leaves the reader stunned at the beauty and tragedy of the
life of Sylvia Plath.
Reviews and Awards:
Michael L. Printz Award, 2008 Honor Book
Myra Cohn Livingston Award for Poetry, 2008 Winner
YALSA Best Books for Young Adults, 2008; American Library Association ; Top Ten
“…an intimate, comprehensive, imaginative view of a
life that also probes the relationships between poetry and creativity, mental
fragility, love, marriage, and betrayal”. – Booklist
"Hemphill's verse, like Plath's, is completely
compelling: every word, every line, worth reading." – The Horn Book Magazine
Connections:
Hemphill’s book
could be used in conjunction with a unit on Sylvia Plath’s poetry, Ariel or Colossus for example, or her novel,
The Bell Jar. Students could be given an opportunity of
writing their own attempt at confessional poetry.
Personal Response:
The book is
classified as juvenile, but probably belongs with the young adult collection
due to containing content about depression, suicide, and a couple of graphic
sexual references. As an adult reading
this novel, I was put through an emotional wringer, and it will resonate with
me for a long time. A brilliant and
tormented poet, Plath’s life was tragically cut short, and we feel that loss in
this book.
References
Alexander, Joy. 2005. "The verse-novel: A new genre."
Children’s Literature in Education. Vol. 36, no. 3.
Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. N.d. Your Own, Sylvia by Stephanie Hemphill. http://ezproxy.twu.ed/index.php/bookdetail/index?page=1&pos=1&isbn=9780375837999 (accessed October 7, 2013).
Kelly
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