A Writing Kind of Day

April 1, 2005
Gr 4-8 -A young writer's daily experiences and concerns are folded into poems to which many readers can relate. For example, in "Bad Weather," the narrator presents a forecast for the school week, predicting ."..a big term paper/due to arrive on Monday morning," followed by "intense -&grammar drills" on Tuesday, the arrival of "the state writing test" on Wednesday," -&a high probability/of five-paragraph essays" on Thursday, and, finally, on Friday, " -&some relief/when scattered poetry blows in." Varied in mood and tone, the offerings entertain as they celebrate words and language. A grandmother's "Memory Loss" is compared to crossing a river, as "She steps from word to word/until suddenly/she stops in the middle, disoriented." "Poetry" is described as a "sugar-crazed teenager/who just got a license/but refuses to follow/the rules of the road./ -&It embarrasses everyone/by telling the truth." What emerges is a picture of a young writer at work, looking closely at the world, making connections, and seeing the depth and beauty of everyday events and people. Ward's black-and-white illustrations use a variety of mediums, including pencil, photography, computer-generated images, and ink. Many aspiring poets will see the reflection of their own creative spirits and aspirations in this lovely collection." -Lee Bock, Glenbrook Elementary School, Pulaski, WI"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2005
Gr. 3-5. Like Fletcher's " I Am Wings "(1994) and " Relatively Speaking "(1999)" , "this mock-autobiographical collection unpretentiously demonstrates how poems can transform the daily experiences of a child's life into dead-on truth bombs. "You can't write a poem / about a squished squirrel / my teacher insisted, / but I don't think that's true," observes Fletcher's endearing (and most likely male) narrator, who pens 27 primarily free-verse poems on many topics, from roadkill and Venus's-flytraps to weightier subjects such as a grandmother's senility. All subvert the notion that poetry requires lofty themes and rarified language; many satirize the dry, technical manner in which the genre is often taught, involving rote memorization of forms (which the narrator imagines getting munched by a poem-gobbler, whose ingestion of haiku, cinquains, and sonnets require "some onomatopoeia / to cure a case of diarrhea"). Some readers may wish for flashier visuals than the understated, black-and-white drawings and photos, but others will find inspiration here to declare, like Fletcher's confident young writer, that "poems are " not "extinct."" "(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)