Rhyme Zone – Books – Review

If babies get an edge in math by listening to Mozart, might poetry — Mother Goose, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Emily Dickinson — tune young ears to the music of language? Here are four collections — two anthologies, two by individual poets — to take children from their earliest delight in sounds to mature enjoyment of such demanding poetry as Ted Hughes’s.

Like the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose, the verse in Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters’s “Here’s a Little Poem” is blessed with catchy rhythms. The 61 selections reflect the toddler’s expanding world: sections include “Me, Myself and I,” “Who Lives in My House?” and “I Go Outside.” Good humor reigns, as in Margaret Mahy’s strategy with a “remarkably light” sister (“It’s a troublesome thing, / but we tie her with string, / and we use her instead of a kite”) and Michael Flanders and Donald Swann’s “Mud,” with its exuberant illustration of gleeful splashing. The pacing is nicely varied: “Mud” follows Langston Hughes’s mellow “April Rain Song” (“Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops”). Bedtime poems round out a collection with just one misstep: Milne’s “Halfway Down” breaks off halfway, at “the stair / where / I always / stop,” robbed of its raison d’être — the intriguing notion that “It isn’t really anywhere! / It’s somewhere else / instead.” Still, with a wonderful range of choices and Polly Dunbar’s inviting illustrations, this could become a favorite lap book.

Children will meet some of the best-known poetry in English in Jackie Morris’s “The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems.” Some are so well known as to seem superfluous (“The Road Not Taken,” or Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), yet it’s worth remembering that children themselves are new. The bright watercolors and intriguing hints of story that Morris splashes across the pages make this an attractive venue for first encounters with the soon-to-be-familiar. Though Morris revels in the romantic (“She Walks in Beauty”), her art serves other moods as well — the “jocund company” of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter memories of war. Even without the lush format, the more than 70 poems have enough range and allure to entice the young and the adults who read to them. Luminaries like Yeats and Poe keep amiable company with Ogden Nash (“The Tale of Custard the Dragon”) and Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”).

While anthologies open young minds to poetry’s unbounded possibilities, books like the new collections by Valerie Worth (1933-94) and Ted Hughes (1930-98) impart a deeper sense of a single poet. Worth wrote several volumes of “small” verses. Her poems typically segue from the ordinary (raw carrots, say, or weeds; an old clock; a dead crab) to a small, precise epiphany — about what’s described, about the reader, about the world. Natalie Babbitt, Worth’s frequent collaborator, excelled in delicate pencil drawings that were perfectly paired with the poet’s gentle insights. Surprisingly, Steve Jenkins’s bold cut-paper collages suit these funny, thought-provoking (and previously unpublished) “Animal Poems” just as well.