The Sun in Me: Poems about the Planet

The Sun in Me: Poems about the Planet
Compiled by Grace Nicholls
Illustrated by Beth Krommes
Barefoot Books, 2003

Every week I spend quite a bit of time trying to decide what to post about on Poetry Friday. Yesterday, I went looking through my extensive personal collection of children’s poetry books. Then I pulled The Sun in Me: Poems about the Planet off the shelf. I hadn’t read from the book in a long time. I thought it would be a good anthology to review this week. Its poems celebrate nature—its beauty, the wonder it instills in us, the feelings it evokes. There are twenty-nine poems about the rain and the sea, about birds and the forest, about winter and snow, about corn growing, about stars and the sun. There are poems about observing the world and about listening to quiet sounds.


The book contains poems written by Emily Dickinson, Sappho, John Updike, David McCord, Ian Serrailler, Issa, and Charlotte Zolotow. It also includes many lovely poems I haven’t seen in other anthologies—poems by Grace Nichols, Jean Kenward, John Foster, Moira Andrew, Zaro Weil, an excerpt from a Passamaquoddy Indian song—as well as poems translated from other languages. Beth Krommes, the illustrator of Joyce Sidman’s award-winning poetry book Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow, did the artwork for this book. Her scratchboard and watercolor illustrations are bold and striking and serve as a perfect complement to the poems selected by Grace Nicholls. (Click here to see an illustration from Butterfly Eyes.)


The Sun in Me opens with the poem Behold. On the double-page spread with the poem, Krommes shows a child in a small plane flying above a planet bursting with life—green trees, colorful flowers, and an ocean teeming with fish and a spouting whale.

Excerpts from selected poems included in the book:

From Behold
by Mary Kawena Pukui

Above, above
All birds in air

Below, below
All earth’s flowers…

Sing out and say
Again and refrain

Behold this lovely world.



From I Spun a Star
by John Foster

I spun a star
Which gleamed and glittered in the night.
I spun a star,
Stood watching spellbound from afar,
Until it disappeared from sight…


From The Snow
by Emily Dickinson

It ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen—
Then stills its Artisans—like Ghosts—
Denying they have been—


The book closes with The Sun in Me. Here are the first and last stanzas of the poem.

From The Sun in Me
by Moira Andrew

The sun is in me,
pale morning flames
setting my still-sleeping
heart alight.

The moon is in me,
sad silver beams
painting my dreams
with shadows.


The Sun in Me: Poems about the Planet would make a lovely gift for a young nature lover.

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At Blue Rose Girls, I have another poem by Sherman Alexie this week entitled Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World.


Yat-Yee Chong has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week.

POETRY FRIDAY: Here's a Little Poem

HERE’S A LITTLE POEM:

A VERY FIRST BOOK OF POETRY
Collected by Jane Yolen and Andrew Fusek Peters
Illustrated by Polly Dunbar
Candlewick Press
2007

Wowee! Wow! Wow! What a great anthology of children’s poetry! HERE’S A LITTLE POEM: A VERY FIRST BOOK OF POETRY is one terrific compilation of poems for very young children. It is one of the best comprehensive anthologies for little listeners that I have seen in quite some time. The book includes sixty poems grouped thematically in sections with the following headings: Me, Myself, and I; Who Lives in My House?; I Go Outside; and Time for Bed.

Quoting from the book: “HERE’S A LITTLE POEM gathers poems from various parts of the English-speaking world, including Great Britain, the Caribbean, Australia, and the U. S. Regional spellings and usage have been retained in order to preserve the integrity of the originals.” The works of many of America’s finest children’s poets can be found in the pages of this book: Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Aileen Fisher, Nikki Grimes, Mary Ann Hoberman, Langston Hughes, J. Patrick Lewis, Myra Cohn Livingston, David McCord, Eve Merriam, Lilian Moore, and Marilyn Singer. (The poets whose names are printed in bold text are all recipients of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children.) In addition to these poets, you will find works by Margaret Mahy, Colin McNaughton, Grace Nichols, Dennis Lee, A. A. Milne, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

This book is outstanding in every way: The poems are excellent and will surely appeal to toddlers and preschoolers…and to their parents and teachers who will, undoubtedly, LOVE sharing the rhythmic, rhyming poems in this anthology. The book is big and square and the text is printed in large letters with plenty of space between the lines of the poems. The words stand out on the page--just the way they should in a book for very young children who may be able to learn some sight words as a parent or adult moves an index finger from left to right below the text while reading the poems aloud.

Polly Dunbar’s illustrations for this book are perfect…absolutely perfect! They’re winsome and whimsical and colorful--but not in a splashy or gaudy way. In fact, on some pages, Dunbar uses muted tones--as she does in her illustrations of a young child outgrowing his pajamas, of children playing dress up, of a cat licking the face of a sleeping child in bed, of a rubber-booted child holding an umbrella and skipping along in the rain. Because of the large pages and exceptional book design, the art never intrudes on the text--it just adds to the charm and gentle humor of the poems. I know the word I am going to use to describe this book is overused…but it fits this book to a “T”: It’s delightful! This book has it all: great poetry, great art, and great design.

Here are some excerpts from a few of the fine poems in this book:

From Rickety Train Ride by Tony Mitton

I’m taking the train to Ricketywick
Clickety clickety clack.
I’m sat on my seat
With a sandwich to eat
As I travel the trickety track.

From Bumble Bee by Margaret Wise Brown

Where are you taking
Your golden plunder
Humming along
Like baby thunder?
Over the clover
And over the hay
Then over the apple trees
Zoom away.


Bobbi Katz’s Cat Kisses, my daughter’s favorite poem when she was little, has a two-page spread all to itself. The poem begins:

Sandpaper kisses
On a cheek or a chin
That is the way
For a day to begin!

The book also contains John Mole’s A Musical Family, a poem that never fails to bring a smile to my face. The poem ends:

Dad can play the clarinet.
My sister plays the fiddle.
But I’m the one who hits the piano
Slap bang in the middle.

There’s…
Manhattan Lullaby by Norma Farber
and
After a Bath by Aileen Fisher
and
Brother by Mary Ann Hoberman
and
Baby Fingers by Nikki Grimes
and
Bananas and Cream by David McCord
and
Halfway Down by A. A. Milne
and…and…and…
so many other wonderful little verses that will sing to little children with their rhythm and rhyme.

The book opens with the poem A Circle of Sun by Rebecca Kai Dotlich and with a bright illustration of a child who thinks she’s “a piece of the sky” dancing inside a sun. It ends with an illustration of a mother bending over to kiss a child goodnight and these words from Leslea Newman’s As the Crow Flies:

As the rainbow arcs
As the sun burns
As the dog barks
As the earth turns

As the stars gleam
As the doves coo
As the child dreams
So I love you.

HERE'S A LITTLE POEM is one terrific anthology. Jane Yolen, Andrew Fusek Peters, and Polly Dunbar have given us a "a very first book of poetry" that is sure to become a favorite.