Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy!: (and other funny poems) [Paperback]

Barry Dordick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2004

Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy! is the exciting new collection of fun poems you've all been waiting for. Here is a delightfully illustrated book filled with dazzling rhythms, cool wordplay, and lots of memorable characters like Uncle Max, Julia the Giraffe, and Minsky the Groundhog. Inside you will find many poems that you will want to read again and again, including: "Glad to be a Gladiator," "General Broccoli," and "A Flibble, A Flobble, A Fliggle, A Floop." So, come experience a poetic extravaganza that is sure to "knock your socks off!" But don't take our word for it. Listen to what all the critics are saying: Wow, what a book! Simply amazing! I couldn't stop laughing! -Bettina Bopp Hilarious Sensational Astonishing! I'd give it 3 thumbs up!! -Maxwell the Turtle I chuckled, I chortled, I tittered, I guffawed. I even fell down and rolled around on the floor! -Sir Bentley the Pig Absolute nonsense-a total delight! -Jilly Jamster

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Here is a delightfully illustrated book filled with dazzling rhythms, cool wordplay, and lots of memorable characters like Uncle Max, Julia the Giraffe, and Minsky the Groundhog.

About the Author

Born and raised in New York City, Barry Dordick always dreamed of playing for the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks, but since those dreams never materialized, he became an English teacher and a humorous poet instead. Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy! is his second book. He is also the author of Macaroni on the Moon.

Product Details

• Paperback: 114 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (April 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595313175
• ISBN-13: 978-0595313174
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,733,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Children's Poetry for All Stages, November 7, 2004

By 

A Reader (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy!: (and other funny poems) (Paperback)

Barry Dordick's rollicking second book of poetry for youngsters, Dear Cow, Not Now, I'm Busy, is replete with rhymes that could give twentieth-century light-verse master Odgen Nash something to muse about. "Hugs," for example, features such marvelous rhyming couplets: "Schnauzer"/"'Yowzer!'","iguana"/"wanna," and "koala"/"scholar!" In "Say Cheese!" the poet says the names of several kinds of cheese and pairs them with hilarious rhymes and slant-rhymes: "Gouda"/"cuter," "Cheddar"/"letter," "gotta"/"Ricotta" (36).
Animals with human abilities, foibles, and desires are a staple of children's poetry, but Dordick's rhyming rejuvenates these conventions, as in "Maxwell," named after a turtle who knows how to "fax well" and "play/The sax well" (6) and, especially, in "Irving the Armadillo."
Various poems celebrate the notion of art as a vehicle for exuberance, expansiveness, and admirable individuality. Marc "Chagall wants to paint the universe," and Dordick shows us how he does:
the "extraordinary" powers of the unconscious are at work, when the events of "sleep" permit the artist to "leap" beyond ordinary aesthetic or representational possibilities or, somehow, to "float away on a cloud." Of course, the force of art can be perilous to the boundaries that members of its audience may erect: "I got chased/ By a couple of oboes,/ I got chased/ By a band of bassoons./ I got chased/ by some wild percussion/ Through so many/ Different rooms" (24).
The most innovative poem in the book is "Boy, Do I Love Math!," which undermines mathematics's stereotypical association with either tedium or absence of emotion and gives a sense of the aesthetic joy that actual mathematicians experience when "numbers . . . bounce around/ in friendly shapes and sizes./ Equations seem to smile and wink,/ They come with cool surprises" (67.)

Dear Cow will teach children a great deal about the pleasures of language along with opportunities for the imagination's exercise, and these subtle, witty poems also offer considerable enjoyment to adult readers.