Doodle Dandies: Poems That Take Shape

by J. Patrick Lewis, Lisa Desimini (Illustrator)

Overview

I
am
a
nee
dle
of
steel
glass &
cement
102
stories
high on a clear
day you can see
200
miles out into the
Atlantic or watch
hundreds of ants
scurrying like
people on the sidewalks
below & the yellow
bugs racing recklessly
along the city streets &
ride the elevator all the
way down in 37 seconds
FLAT

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780689848896
Publisher:	Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	03/01/2002
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.20(d)
Lexile:	NP (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

J. Patrick Lewis is a poet and prose writer noted for his children's poems and other light verse.

Editorial Reviews

Through fanciful design and illustration, these poems take both shape and flight as they soar through the imaginative landscape. Inventively rhymed, each of the small, witty poems is a concrete poem-designed to take the form of its subject. In several instances, the very text of the poem is set in the corresponding shape, so that, for example, the orange and yellow letters of giraffe actually create the body of the animal. This careful configuration allows the word tail to form the tail, and the last word of the poem, stilts, is repeated four times to become the giraffe's legs-providing the appro-priate image both visually and verbally. "First Burst of Spring" springs to life in one simple line placed above sneakered footprints in grainy dirt-"The day is cold, the earth is mud, but don't let anything stop you, Bud!"-with the word bud set as upwardly reaching green letters topped by a bright pink exclamation point, con-juring the perfect spring tulip. Desimini's mixed-media collage provides a wide variety of backdrops for the poems, from the orange, textured fur of a tiger's face filling an entire page to the soft dunes behind her oddly opalescent camels. Dark colors prevail for most of the book, lit occasionally by a blue sky or glowing moon. A true collaboration of text and art presenting poems that are pictures that are poems....

Horn Book Magazine

Lewis's book of poems is a pleasure and also a challenge, for readers must decipher the oddly skewed type; the volume is also a celebration of the natural world. Halley's Comet tears through the skyþ"a cosmic snowball made of dusty ice and gas. Once or twice a century I pass the Earth and Sun"þtrailing mists of typeface. A giraffe's "brown and yellow patchwork quilts, turns tail and hobbles away on wooden stilts" has word-legs that hang like pendulums. One poem explodes like a shower of fireworks, reads left, then right; another captures the haiku evanescence of a butterfly: "The butterfly is the fantasy fulfiller of every caterpillar." There is mirror writing, a winter's-night letter storm, and a salute to synchronized swimming. There is a delight in language that is economical: "An oyster boy, an oyster girl, an oyster dad, a mother-of-pearl." Desimini's mixed-media images contain a measure of sophisticated giddiness to give the poems an added fillip. (Picture book/poetry. 3-8)

Kirkus Reviews