Amazon.com Review
Sixty years ago, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)--America's unofficial poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, biographer, and historian--wrote a batch of children's poetry, but it wasn't until 1999 that Sandburg scholars George and Willene Hendrick found these 19 lively prose poems amidst thousands of yellowed manuscripts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In
Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote we learn that "Eggs may speak to buttons--that is correct. / Buttons, however, must not speak to eggs." Sandburg, like most children, also enjoys musing on various body parts: "The nose is to breathe and to smell with. / Eyes need two and ears need two but one nose / is enough if it has two nostrils." In other poems, he revels in defining and exploring terms that we often use, letting his imagination wander through each word's possibilities: "Stumbling is where you walk and find you are not walking." "Manners is when you know how to eat without being bashful." "Music is when your ears like what you hear." Familiar objects such as wheels, clocks, chairs, and pencils are all subject to Sandburg's simple, childlike "write-down-everything-this-makes-you-think-of" approach to poetry.
In the hands of the whimsical Istvan Banyai (of Zoom and Re-Zoom), Sandburg's poems meet their visual match. Banyai's basic, black-and-white, pen-and-ink illustrations--combined with computer-generated stretched, condensed, curved, or diagonal type--enliven and enhance the poet's wordplay with equally inventive results. As Sandburg gleefully investigates the concept of chair legs, Banyai shows a chair casually crossing its legs. As Sandburg pontificates on pencils ("Pencils too pointed break the points and / then laugh at you"), Banyai sketches the antics of a pencil-headed man (who doesn't seem to enjoy the sharpening process). This unusual collection will no doubt encourage children to open their eyes to a nonliteral universe, and perhaps jumpstart an interest in creative writing. (That's right--poems don't have to rhyme!) (Ages 7 and older) --Karin Snelson
From Publishers Weekly
Wrested from obscurity in the archives of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign library, this bizarre collection of Sandburg's previously unpublished children's verse is not without its droll charms. The poems themselves are uneven, as befits unfinished work; almost all define homely objects or body parts. Many of the lines are somewhat pedestrian ("Toes are to wash when you take a bath" in "Toes"; "Pencils are to hold when you write" in "Pencils"), but they generally lead to an arresting twist ("The big toe likes itself very well"). The tone of the book as a whole is determinedly eccentric, right from the brief introduction by compilers George and Willene Hendrick: "Poets are sometimes forgetful...." The narrow, five-by-nine-inch pages look as if they had been designed to be carried in a breast pocket. Banyai's (Zoom) black-and-white art includes surrealistic surprises, as when a pencil-headed man is sharpened by a knife. His imagery depends in great part on his fanciful way with the type. The title page, for example, is laid out to resemble a doctor's eye chart; inside, some letters are made to resemble the concepts to which they refer, as when the letter "o" in the word "nobody" bounces down the stairs that are formed by the previous lines of the poem. But the idiosyncratic trappings don't disguise the underdone contents: there's less here than meets the eye. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
