I used to be a very wordy writer. I could not for the life of me be concise, and sometimes I took ages to get to the point. I am less verbose now, but I still admire people who can say a lot without having to use reams of words. In this book Douglas Florian beautifully describes a collection of animals using very few words and I am in awe of his skill.
Beast Feast
Beast Feast
Douglas Florian
Poetry Picture Book
For ages 5 to 7
Harcourt, 1994, 978-0-152-01737-8
Most of us tend to take a long time to say what we want
to say. We don’t try to describe things in a concise way, and sometimes what we
want to say or describe gets lost in the throng of words. In this collection,
poet and illustrator, Douglas Florian, beautifully captures the nature or
habits of twenty-one animals using very few words.
Often the poems
are amusing. For example in The Anteater
we are told that this animal has a “long and tacky tongue,” which goes “snaking
from its snout.” The anteater uses this tongue to snag termites, a thousand of
which go “riding in” to the anteater’s mouth, but none come “riding out.”
In the shortest
of the poems Douglas Florian often tweaks the words he uses, and the result is
clever and amusing. In The Rhea he
tells us that this large bird is “rheally” strange. It is just like an ostrich
that has been “rhearranged.”
Sometimes the
poem is told from the animal’s point of view, and sometimes the poet himself
expresses an opinion. In The Pigeon,
he admits that he does not “Love the pigeon” but he does “like it” because the
bird has its own way of doing things. It bobs its head when it walks, and pigeons
are brave creatures, who may even we willing to sit on one’s shoulder.
There are some poems that tell us exactly what
the animal in question is like. For example we learn that toads, the “squat and
plump” relative of the frog, does not jump very often. It is a nocturnal
creature that hunts during the night and that “hops into an earthy borrow” to
nap until it is time to hunt again.
With poems that
amuse, intrigue, and inform, this is a collection that young readers will enjoy
sharing with friends and family members.
No comments:
Post a Comment