Hippopotamus Stew and Other Silly Animal Poems
by Joan Horton; illustrated by Joann Adinolfi
I cracked this open looking for a Poetry Friday entry and was immediately bitten by the green-eyed monster. These are exactly the kind of poems I hope to write whenever I get a few 36-hour days. They're the amuse bouche of children's poems, pungent morsels that whet your appetite for silliness.
Horton takes us through a menagerie of critters, adding quirky twists to familiar images, such as the jellyfish in a variety of flavors that go well with peanut butter, or the snake who wants a zipper to help shed his skin.
The poems aim squarely at kid level, needing little or no explanation to make them hilarious, and will yield more yuks with repeated readings as kids gradually "get" them:
The Sheep
With woolly fleece upon his back,
He's subject to a moth attack.
A nibble here, a munchie there,
And pretty soon the sheep is bare,
Which makes him look downright pathetic.
Too bad his fleece is not synthetic.
Unexpected rhymes and dead-on meter elevate these bits of whimsy to the sublime.
Adinolfi's collages are vivid confections of odd bits of paper, watercolor and colored pencil in cheerfully clashing tropical hues.
Her renderings are flat in what I call the nouveau naive style designed to make the animals more playful and less threatening, plus there's a multi-racial cast of kids. Sometimes she leaves wide washes of color for the text, and other times lets white space do the talking for a less busy feel.
Rating: *\*\*\
UPDATE: Kelly at Big A Little a has the whole, lovely list of Poetry Friday participants. Check it out.
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