Boom Boom Go Away

by Laura Geringer
illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline
Atheneum 2010

"A most unusual bedtime story" the cover touts, and I have to agree: the book does everything in its power to keep kids awake and shouting at their parents to go away and leave them alone.

A little gnome sits banging away at his drum. His mother tells him it's time for bed. His response?

"Hush! / Don't spoil the rhythm / of my drum." / boom boom / "Go away" / boom boom / "Go away!"

This is followed by a succession of toys; an elf on a gong, a prince with a bassoon, a knight with bells, a robot with spoons, mermaids with harps, a bear with a horn, all adding their own particular piece to the cacophany, all telling their parents to hush and go away. At the end we see a small boy fading into his bed with the refrain, his toys scattered about on his bed, all quiet.

Inspired by a song the author's child learned at a Dalcroze music class, the song has been imagined here to be a bedtime story, but the original point of the song was teach rhythm and cadence and hardly includes actions and sounds conducive to quieting a child's mind for sleep. Indeed, I sincerely doubt the song was taught as a pre-nap exercise, and in the author's note Geringer confesses her own child repeated the opening verse over and over – mostly likely the outcome for any impressionable child. The fact that the refrain includes a bit of defiance, a hush and go away, would seem to be exactly the sort of thing adults would want to discourage not reinforce through the repetition of this text.

Ibatoulline's illustrations disappoint as well here. Where in Jane Yolan's The Scarecrow's Dance there was life and nuance here this are static, dead toys against neutral backgrounds that echo the emptiness.

The Perfect Day

by Remy Charlip
Greenwillow Press 2007

In very quiet rhymes Remy sets the scene.

Mountain
Valley
Rising sun
Time to wake
Day has begun

The sun is rising in the on the mountain while the night is still nestled in the valley. We move from the large to the small as a child and parent sit at breakfast and plot out their day. In luminous watercolor they move to a hike, gaze at the clouds, have lunch with friends, sing and play, sit under a quiet tree and take a nap.

The day moves on, the simple rhymes gently drifting like a breeze across the pages. They return home, paint pictures of their day, "read from picture books and think"...

And I stop cold. First, Charlip is suggesting that parents and children not only read picture books but that they think about them. Without disturbing the flow of the book he has included a very careful suggestion that picture books not just be read but considered, pondered, discussed. Then I look at the picture carefully and notice dozens of books open on the floor, all miniature watercolor spreads from Charlip's many books.

I so want to be wrong about this, but it feels like Remy Charlip is taking inventory and saying his good-byes.

I continue on. Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow we can laugh and play. I feel uneasy. The child is nestled into bed, the window above the bed filled with the mountain and valley from the beginning, the sun on the other side now signaling the end of the day, a passage into the night.

Mountain Valley Setting sun Time to sleep Night has begun

Remy Charlip finished this book before suffering his stroke in October of 2005 and as of a year ago was still undergoing physical therapy, the note above his work desk where the proofs for this book lay reading "Go slow. Do less." My hope is that it's coincidental he included his published history strewn on the floor of a painting for his latest book -- an inside joke -- and that he'll continue to perform his dances of quiet whimsy in picture book form.

In ruminating over the summary of this back back in January on his birthday I doubted the book was as simple as it's description:

A parent and child spend a perfect day together, from sunrise to nightfall.

Now, of course, I want to believe it is just that simple.

Today at the Bluebird Cafe

A Branchful of Birds
by Deborah Ruddell
illustrated by Joan Rankin
Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster 2007

It's all-you--can-eat at the Bluebird Cafe,
a grasshopper-katydid-cricket buffet,
with berries and snails and bluebottle fly,
a sip of the lake and a bite of the sky.

Oh, but it starts off so promising.

This collection of poems about birds could have been swell if it hadn't suffered from that common malady of uneven rhymes and herky-jerky meter.

If I'm repeating myself, forgive me, but if you're going to write rhyming poetry it needs to have a natural rhythm. I'm not going to be a stickler for meter unless you start out a poem with it but drop it when it becomes inconvenient half way through the poem. If you are going to hold to the meter it still needs to sound natural.

I call it the read-aloud test, it needs to have a read-aloud rhythm. That is, a child with reading fluency should be able to pick up the poem and read it cold and capture the rhythm. They can falter in the first line or two as they get the hang of things, but it shouldn't be catching them off-guard along the way. The fun in reading poetry for kids is in the wordplay, it's in the cleverness of the beat where they (as readers or listeners) can follow along. The words need to roll off the tongue or dance in their head.

Not sound like the equivalent of a teen driver leaning how to drive a stick.

The names we know, they know the rules and they know how to bend them. Shel Silverstien and Jerry Moss understood this, and no surprise both were also lyricists; Karla Kuskin gets it; Edward Lear even in his most forced verse gets it; Maurice Sendak, certainly; Prelutsy, Florian and Stevenson all grok the rhythm. And yet book after book of rhyming text -- poetry and picture book -- roll off the presses with awkward phrasing and broken meter and all the prettiest pictures in the world won't save them.

Why? Why, if compelled to write in verse, wouldn't a writer want to make their verse the best it could possibly be? There's no sin in striving to become classic, why settle? What is the point of the exercise if the only concern is the rhyme? What's the reason?

Seminar after seminar, listing after listing in the Writer's Market, editors beg and scream: Please! No rhyming texts! And yet, these same publishers are the guiltiest of parties. I won't place all the blame on the writers.

Another book of poems, trashed;
Another round of hopes, dashed.