Tag: poems

Hello, Baby

My Book of Firsts: Poems Celebrating a Baby’s Milestones – written by Lee Wardlaw, illustrated by Bruno Brogna
Red Comet Press, 2025

Opening Lee Wardlaw and Bruno Brogna’s endearing book about the milestones in a baby’s life is like taking a step, or rather two. The first is into the perspective of a baby or toddler, as well as her caretakers, as each one experiences a sense of accomplishment. The second step leads into classic mid-twentieth century illustration, with pictures that promote nostalgia, but not fantasy.  Babies have always been babies, but ways of visualizing our delight in them have taken different forms.

Wardlaw is a prolific poet, with most of her work aimed at older children. In My Book of Firsts she uses direct and off-rhyme, onomatopoeia, and other familiar forms from traditional poetry for the young.  In “First Word,” she charts the series of incomprehensible sounds that eventually become human speech: “Squeaked,/shrieked,/squawked,/and scowled,” “Babbled,/gabbled, jabbered, mooed…” resolves into the surprise of the child’s first word.  Brogna’s accompanying picture shows a mother fox in a smart yellow housedress with white collar, as well as a bushy red tail. She is holding up her kit and they are clearly communicating their mutual joy.

The same mom is at a first birthday party for a bear cub, with other species in attendance. (image).  The bear parents are much stockier than the fox mother, and they are wearing appropriately looser, but still attractive, clothing.  Wardlaw’s poem begins with rhyming couplets that build momentum: “Up early./Family flurry./Bake a cake./Decorate./Guests arrive./Come inside!”  In addition to the cake there is pizza, juice boxes (a more contemporary touch), and other delicately colored pastel items that may be vegetables, pastry, and candy.

Each poem refers to events that parents will recognize. “First Outing” catalogues the crucial items necessary for this milestone. These include the general categories of sunscreen, diapers, and tasty snack, but also the more specific “Flossy cap that Grandma knit.”  A raccoon mother holds her careful checklist and pushes the stroller as fast as she can as her child points to the “adoring fans” waiting to meet him.

Naturally, one poem is devoted to the accomplishment that any reader of this book would expect. In “First Book,” a rabbit reads to her kit. The book has a duck on its cover, because children’s interest is not limited to their own identity. The first stanza describes how a child first engages with this new object: “What is that?/Let me hold it!/I promise not to bend/or/fold it” She is excited to learn that mother and child can share the experience of this wonderful object. The book is “a perfect fit” for her hands, but “We both can sit/and look at pictures inside of it.” Of course, books end, but reading does not, and the kit demands a second reading, and inevitably many more.

My Book of Firsts includes spaces to record a child’s name, first birthday, first steps, and several more milestones, reinforcing the allusion to classic poetry and illustration. Childrearing methods change, but charting a baby’s progress, with patience and awe, does not.

Poems That Take Flight

Words with Wings and Magic Things – written by Matthew Burgess, illustrated by Doug Salati
Tundra Books, 2025

Designing a book of poetry for children is not an easy task.  There are outstanding collections of classic poems accompanied by different artists’ interpretation. A Child’s Garden of Verse alone has been illustrated by, among others, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Gyo Fujikawa, Alice and Martin Provensen, and Eloise Wilkin.  Recently, Rosemary Wells had the courage to apply her own individual vision to a selection of A.A. Milne’s poems from When We Were Very Young, although they are inextricably linked to the artwork of Ernest H. Shepard.  There are modern classics by such disparate poets as Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Bobbi Katz, and Julie Fogliano.  Words with Wings and Magic Things joins this distinguished company, while adding level of originality and beauty that stands on its own.

On the one hand, children are natural drawn to rhyme and rhythm. On the other, after a certain age they sometimes approach it with skepticism. Where is the plot? Maybe enough humor will compensate for that, and some poets try to hard by overloading their work with this feature.  Matthew Burgess seems to have chosen the subject and form of each poem with respect for children’s intelligence.  The book is organized into thematic sections, each introduced by a two-line poem. “Wild” summarizes excursions into that territory. “The animal inside of us who longs to wander free,/the sparkling specks of stardust that make up you and me.” The poems use different rhyme schemes, alliteration, and stanza lengths, and address subject matter ranging from whimsical to philosophical. There is not a pretentious note in the book.

Doug Salati’s pictures show a kind of exuberance, whatever the subject of the poem he is illustrating. There are two-page spreads with lavish colors and smaller image set against white space. Some pages feature cut-out windows to the following picture, allowing a moon, for example, to transform into a polar bear’s fur. His allusions to classic children’s books are not eye-winking secret messages to adults; they are wonderful homages that set his own work within a lasting tradition.  The lions in “Living with Lions” recall Sendak’s Pierre: they appear somewhat sly, as if unsure about whether to act as predators. “When they wake,/bake a cake,” the girl in the picture wisely decides.

The dog next to the slide in “Wild” is definitely related to Margaret Bloy Graham’s Harry the Dirty Dog. If children don’t recognize these forbears of Salati’s characters, it would be a great opportunity to introduce them. He also shows up accompanying the beginning of “Whoops and Whallops,” about life’s inevitably embarrassing and difficult moments, eating popcorn, and along with his human friend, enjoying a show.  The performing dog recalls the harlequin-costumed animals of The Color Kittens.

Maybe it seems obvious that yetis’ favorite food is spaghetti. Burgess twists the strands of language into invented words that make perfect sense in Salati’s scene of feasting monsters. Twist the fork into your noodles;/Meatball, meatball, and spagoodles.” By the end of the poem, the elongated pasta returns to normal: “Now eat it up, you hungry yet;. Meatball, meatball, and spaghetti.”  Poets and artists can accomplish magic.