Entrancing Poetry Picture Books – The New York Times

Countless picture books follow the same narrative structure, in which a character faces a challenge and then — at the end of approximately 500 words — overcomes that challenge, or doesn’t. We call this story. “Read me a story,” a child might beg, and so we do.

But not all picture books are stories in the traditional sense, and often poetry is the tool that frees an author from the expectations of conflict and resolution. By trusting language, form, rhythm or sound to hold the reader’s focus, a poet is able to slow down or speed up, to observe or reflect. Picture books in verse can meditate or meander, imagine or reminisce, examine one small aspect of the world carefully, or elicit deep emotion.

One thing that sets picture books apart from titles for older readers is that we often share them with another person. In BOOM, BELLOW, BLEAT: Animal Poems for Two or More Voices (WordSong, 32 pp., $19.95; ages 3 to 6), Georgia Heard’s text leans into this interactive experience, creating the space for distinct speakers in each poem. Each is intended as a sort of duet, with the text set in different colors to differentiate the alternating parts.

The book relies heavily on the humor and child-friendly simplicity of animal noises, but the noises animals make are not always what you’d expect. In “We Don’t Say Ribbit,” a frog and toad offer the less expected noises they might actually make in the wild, from “quonk” to “errrgh,” almost certain to entice laughter from young readers.

In several of these poems, the language is more mature, as in “Flight of the Honeybees,” where “Pale celery parasols” or “yellow petaled broccoli” may be a challenge to younger readers. But the beauty of poetry for small children is that the sounds of words can be appealing long before their meanings are fully understood.

Many of these poems also incorporate refrains, allowing a young listener to repeat after another reader, as in “Song Thief,” where the second reader, as mockingbird, repeats everything the first reader has just said. “Why is it / why is it / what I sing / what I sing / you sing too?” Heard’s engaging poems, paired with Aaron DeWitt’s bright digital images of the natural world, are designed to bring readers together, and with an informative author’s note on various elements of the natural world, they may also find a welcome role in the classroom.

“Each tree offers / a story…” begins Verlie Hutchens and Jing Jing Tsong’s TREES (Beach Lane, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 4 to 8) and what unfolds is exactly that, a series of brief character studies, as page after page, readers are introduced to a surprisingly varied cast of arboreal personalities.

Gracefully, each spread offers a distinct new friend for young readers. Pussy willow is shy, waiting for the one week in spring when “kitten velvet buds / adorn her modest twigs.” By contrast, White Pine is an “unruly uncle,” with his “buttons akilter” and “shaggy hair unkempt.” Each tree is memorable, and Hutchens’s vivid descriptions are full of movement and relatable moments. Tsong’s colorful illustrations invite readers to peer from a range of vantage points and angles, as if looking down through the foliage. Young readers on walks may well experience the canopy above them a little differently after encountering the trees through Hutchens’s and Tsong’s eyes.

Yet the book may do little to help them see people differently, since “Trees” also reinforces traditional gender roles. Female-identified trees are described as “silly” as they dance on “tippy toes” and sport “baubles.” Meanwhile, the masculine trees are “strong” and “mighty” as well as “wise.” An unfortunate choice for a book that might easily have resisted such bias.

In reading poetry, we are sometimes so lulled by rhythm and sound that we forget to pay attention to meaning. This can be especially true with familiar poems, as they become ingrained in our consciousness. A picture book version of Robert Frost’s THE ROAD NOT TAKEN (Familius, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 4 to 8), with illustrations by Vivian Mineker, does a wonderful job of reintroducing a well-known poem without altering a single word. The choice to redivide stanzas and to rebreak lines, as well as to set the poem in the contemporary-feeling world of Mineker’s soft palette, invites a fresh reading.

In the beginning of the book, a young boy with a backpack stands near his dog, at a fork in the road. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” As the text reflects on this moment, we view him from a distance, and then from far above. We witness the boy’s indecision, and finally his seemingly arbitrary choice.

From there, the book continues, and we journey along with the poem and the boy, as he grows, goes to school, chooses a career and builds a family. Finally, at the poem’s poignant end, we face the old man who has been reciting the poem and reminiscing all along, surrounded by his grandchildren. “And that has made all the difference.”

This is a book that begs rereading. Visually, it’s unclear what beckons the boy along his initial path, and there’s a sort of randomness, a meandering mazelike quality to the artwork, if an emotional inevitability to the poem’s conclusion. Robert Frost might well have approved that ambiguity.

“This is for the unforgettable / the swift and sweet ones / who hurdled history / and opened a world / of possible.” The beginning of Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson’s THE UNDEFEATED (Versify/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 4 and up) feels anthemic. Listen up, the book seems to say, I’m going to share something important.

What follows is a powerful tribute to the African-American experience, replete with joy and pride in the accomplishments of individual artists and athletes, leaders and thinkers. But the book also communicates a strong sense of the suffering without which this history would be incomplete. Alexander’s resonant twisting language, and Nelson’s rich painterly style, serve to capture not just individuals but the community as a whole.

“The ones who survived / America / by any means necessary.” The book continues. “And the ones who didn’t.” This second line of text is set starkly against blank white pages, demanding that the reader consider the lives lost and the voices silenced by our history.

We see this same kind of restraint a little further along, in the startling repetition of “This is for the unspeakable.” Three spreads repeat this simple line, allowing the reader to sit with images of unforgivable acts from both past and present, inviting us to silently bear witness when words fail.

Elsewhere, the text swells again, as words and art offer a litany of historical figures and important moments, filling the ears with rhythms that demand attention, calling on poetry of the past. “This is for the unbelievable / The We Real Cool ones. / This is for the unbending. / The black as the night is beautiful ones.” These lines sing, and the accompanying paintings feel like a walk through a portrait gallery.

Poetry knows when to lean forward and when to pull back, and in “The Undefeated,” Alexander has walked that line perfectly. This book will fill readers with a sense of the wealth and the cost of history.