A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Formsby Paul Janeczko
Publishers Weekly
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Starred Review. Janeczko and Raschka, on the heels of A Poke in the I, explain and sometimes bend the rules of 29 poetic forms, taking their title from a concrete poem of a stick figure punting a ball ("poetry jumpstarts my imagination.... poetry gives me a kick in the head"). By way of introduction, Janeczko asks, "Why 17 syllables in a haiku?," then points out the pleasurable rigors of poetic exercise: "Can you do a good job within these limits?" The pages demonstrate compact forms like the couplet, tercet and quatrain, and proceed to the more complex roundel, triolet, villanelle (basically "five tercets followed by a quatrain") and pantoum (a set of quatrains where, in the final stanza, "lines 2 and 4 repeat lines 3 and 1 of the opening stanza. Whew!"). Janeczko emphasizes play, and gives definitions in unintimidating, perhaps too tiny gray print; his approachable examples range from an Edward Lear limerick and Shakespeare's 12th sonnet to an "Ode to Pablo's Tennis Shoes" by Gary Soto and a comic epitaph by J. Patrick Lewis. Raschka marks each form with a witty icon: stacked rows of tulips (haiku, tanka), a bouncing ball (limerick), an urn (ode), a guitar (ballad). His multimedia collages feature fibrous, fuzzy-edged origami paper on a clean white ground; his sensuous brushwork alludes to Zen calligraphy, while his poppy reds, jade greens and brilliant yellows recall kimono designs or Matisse's tropical palette. Janeczko's disciplined but accessible examples, plus Raschka's spirited Asian-inspired images, add oomph to this joyful poetry lesson, sure to be welcomed by teachers and aspiring poets everywhere. Ages 8-11. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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BookList
: From BookList, March 15, 2005, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. : *Starred Review* : Gr. 4-6. The creators of A Poke in the I (2001) offer another winning, picture-book poetry collaboration. Here, each poem represents a different poetic form, from the familiar to the more obscure. The excellent selection easily mixes works by Shakespeare and William Blake with entries from contemporary poets for youth, including Janeczko. Once again, Raschka's high-spirited, spare torn-paper-and-paint collages ingeniously broaden the poems' wide-ranging emotional tones. A playful, animal-shaped quilt of patterned paper illustrates Ogden Nash's silly couplet “The Mule,” while an elegant flurry of torn paper pieces makes a powerful accompaniment to Georgia Heard's heartbreaking poem, “The Paper Trail,” about lives lost on 9/11. Clear, very brief explanations of poetic forms (in puzzlingly tiny print) accompany each entry; a fine introduction and appended notes offer further information, as do Raschka's whimsical visual clues, such as the rows of tulips representing the syllables in a haiku. Look elsewhere for lengthy explanations of meter and rhyme. This is the introduction that will ignite enthusiasm. The airy spaces between the words and images will invite readers to find their own responses to the poems and encourage their interest in the underlying rules, which, Janeczko says, “make poetry--like sports--more fun.”
GillianEngberg. : | distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.: |
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