unBEElievables

Happy National Poetry Month!  What better way to celebrate the rhyming season than with this adorable bee book written and illustrated by Douglas Florian, always a favorite of mine.  Florian has regaled us with poetry collections over the years celebrating trees, dinosaurs, seasons, insects, dogs and fish, and now tackles the honeybee.  The poems themselves are as clever as ever...

The Beekeepers are "the boys in the hood"...
"We're keeping the bees. 
  We fret and we fuss. 
  We're keeping the bees. 
  Or do they keep us?"

Bee-coming teaches us...
"From egg I hatch in just three days,
  Bee-ginning my new larval phase. 
  I dwell in a six-sided cell. 
  My cozy home bee-fits me well..."

And my favorite Summer Hummer plays with words delightfully...
"I'm the hummer of summer,
  So busy with buzz. 
  A never-humdrummer 
  All covered with fuzz..."

Florian takes us from bee anatomy through drones, queens and workers, to swarms, hives, honey, and pollen.  He even includes a scary poem about the all too real phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder. At the end of the collection is a BEEbliography as well for further reading.  Perhaps the most notable detail about the book 'beesides' the outstanding rhyme is the inclusion on each page of a snippet of information that provides just a wee bit more for bee fans.  We learn that all worker bees are 'sisters', that queen bees are fed royal jelly and that there are 20,000 known species of bees but fewer than ten known species of honeybees.  Food for thought! I highly recommend this honey of a book.

April Poetry Showers

 posted by Andrea Perry

Not only does April bring showers, it brings National Poetry Month as well. And the best combination of them both is Joan Bransfield Graham's wonderful shape poetry book, Splish Splash.  Splish Splash was my introduction into the wonderful world of shape poetry, and Graham's book is a delightful look at all of the shapes that water takes, from ice cubes, to waves, to rain showers, to rivers and babbling brooks.  The perfect marriage of poetry and art, shape poetry is a great way to have fun with the placement of words on a page to enhance the poetry experience.  Graham has the same fun with Flicker Flash, a collection of poems in the many shapes of light.  From a candle, to a flashlight, to a lighthouse, to a match, to a light bulb, the brightly colored full page illustrated poems are a de-"light."
Two other shape poetry collections that I am fond of are Doodle Dandies by J. Patrick Lewis, and Meow Ruff, A Story in Concrete Poetry, by Joyce Sidman.  As if poetry isn't enough fun, the added bonus of twisting, turning, blooming and exploding words is the icing on the cake. In a few of his poetry collections, author/illustrator Douglas Florian has also included a shape poem or two to accent the shape, movement, or habitat of his selected insect or creature.  If you have not yet been exposed to any shape poetry, make sure to check out these books at your local library, or take a poem out for a spin yourself.  It's a poetry party on the page!