JooHee Yoon’s ‘Beastly Verse,’ and More

JooHee Yoon’s “Beastly Verse” is very much about its pictures. Three-color illustrations of critters fill up page after intense page, cheerily aggressive, goofy, beastly-friendly. Yoon’s poem selection is economical, intelligent, even hip. Laura Richards’s kid-anthology standard “Eletelephony” (“Once there was an elephant, / Who tried to use the telephant —/ No! no! I mean an elephone / Who tried to use the telephone — ”) is here. So, naturally, is Blake’s sublime “The Tyger” (modernized to “The Tiger”: Why?), and Ogden Nash:

The Eel

I don’t mind eels

Except as meals.

And the way they feels.

“Beastly Verse” also contains sur­prises, like Robert Desnos’s “The Pelican,” involving pelican eggs and omelets, and D. H. Lawrence’s “Humming-bird,” which begins

I can imagine, in some otherworld

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

That’s characteristic Lawrence — sprawling, neurotically alive. Kids appreciate the bizarre and off-kilter, and are too often denied it when grown-ups edit for positive messages and sweetness. Hooray for Yoon for countering that. Within the book’s visual continuity, Yoon’s selections change mood: “Sunlight, moonlight, / Twilight, starlight — /Gloaming at the close of day,” begins Walter de la Mare’s “Dream Song,” which goes on to talk of “an owl calling” and “lions roaring, / Their wrath pouring. . . . ” I don’t particularly want to read poems in sans-serif type in bright colors or white letters, never in black, but my daughter thought that was silly of me. Certainly it makes visual sense that in “Dream Song,” “Elf-light, bat-light, / Touchwood-light and toad-light. . . . ” emerge golden from the dark forest Yoon has painted behind the words.

Paul B. Janeczko’s excellent selections for “The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in 50 Objects” are mainly grown-up poems that children will like for their emotional authenticity, verbal texture, accessibility and figurative magic. Chris Raschka’s watercolor-and-ink renderings are attractively impressionistic: “gray and batter’d ship” for Walt Whitman’s “The Dismantled Ship”; ethereal scarecrow for Basho’s “Midnight frost — /I’d borrow / the scarecrow’s shirt”; wheelbarrow and puffy white chicken for William Carlos Williams. Organized chronologically from the early Middle Ages to the contemporary ­Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, the book interprets the word “object” broadly. The inanimate includes Neruda’s stamp album, Sandburg’s lackadaisically aphoristic “Boxes and Bags,” Dickinson’s railway train that her speaker likes to see “lap the miles.” Living objects include Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” (“Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly”), Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The Cat” (who “sees ghosts in motes of air”) and Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” which my in-house predator-lover liked especially for the metaphors:

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

It may be of moral importance for children to have magic in their lives; metaphor is one way for them to experience that. In “The Death of the Hat,” objects can be cosmic, and political, like Langston Hughes’s “Stars”: “O, sweep of stars over Harlem streets, . . . / Reach up your hand, dark boy, and take a star.” Janeczko doesn’t shy from serious matter. There’s war and pastoral richness in the medieval Arab-Andalusian poet Ibn Iyad’s “Grainfield”:

Look at the ripe wheat

bending before the wind

like squadrons of horsemen

fleeing in defeat, bleeding

from the wounds of the poppies.