Friday, February 25, 2011

Poetry Friday




My selection for today is Caroline Kennedy's "A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry For Children" illustrated by Jon J. Muth. Kennedy has collected over one hundred personal favorites...classic poems both traditional and contemporary and some entertaining and thoughtful surprises. The anthology is organized in sections: About Me, Animals, Seasons, and Bedtime to name a few.


Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, and Carl Sandburg share pages with notable children's poets including Jack Prelutsky, A.A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edward Lear. Dylan Thomas is represented, as is Kennedy's mother who is credited with two poems. The volume also contains Psalm 23 and some verses from Ecclesiastes. Muth's glowing watercolors vary in style to perfectly reflect and enhance the shifting moods of the poems. Translated verses appear in their original language at the end which also contains a first-line index.

1 comment:

Sara said...

There was a theatrical presentations of this book at the Kennedy Center, which unfortunately, I missed. Thanks for the insight into this collection---looks wonderful.

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