Poetry Friday

Hooray! The electricity came back on! I don't know what the problem was, exactly, but we got fifteen minutes on Wednesday night and then nothing since until this afternoon. With all the chaos in the country right now I was sure it wouldn't get fixed, but I am happy I was wrong.

Last week I started National Poetry Month with some poetry reviews, and today I was going to review some books from my classroom. Then when we were stuck at home, I decided to review some children's poetry books from my kids' shelves. Then we didn't have power at home, and I went to school since things were calmer on the street, and then I couldn't get Blogger to work there.

Anyway, I decided to stick with Plan B, now that the power's on, and talk about some children's poetry. My children have always enjoyed having poems read to them and we have a reasonably large collection, but here are some my daughter chose as her favorites, plus a couple more I added because I like them.

As a child I loved When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, and I'm happy that my kids like them too. I memorized Disobedience, about James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree and his mother. My daughter's always quoting from poems out of these books.

One Hundred Years of Poetry for Children includes some lovely, unexpected choices: Rabindranath Tagore, for example, and Patricia Beer's Abbey Tomb. Some of the poems are more an adult's idea of what a child should like than what children of my experience actually do like, but on the whole this is a good anthology.

Treasury of Children's Poetry is edited by Alison Sage and includes some traditional choices and some surprises. The illustrations are wonderful. The categories are "Nursery Rhymes and First Poems," "Rhymes and Poems for the Young," "Poems for Older Children," and "Older Poems and Classic Poetry."

My daughter got Children's Classic Poetry as a gift for her second birthday and it has been well-used since; it's falling apart. This is her absolute favorite, with such poems as Mr. Nobody, William Blake's The Tiger, and I Eat My Peas with Honey. It seems to be out of print, but you can get it for one cent on Amazon, so go ahead!

A recent addition to our poetry library is Here's a Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry. Jane Yolen is one of the compilers, and she's such a beautiful poet herself. Polly Dunbar did the fun illustrations. It includes Langston Hughes' April Rain Song (which my five-year-old finds hilariously funny, for some reason), A. A. Milne's Halfway Down, and lots of poems that were new to me. This is a terrific choice for a first poetry anthology.

Poetry Friday is at A Wrung Sponge today. After I link this post I'm getting offline - city power is already off again!