OK, the poem isn’t actually called The Belch of a Blowfish, because the poems in this amazing collection are untitled. But that’s how it starts out, and I had to put something in the title of this post!
Hotel Deep: Light Verse from Dark Water (Harcourt, 2005), is one of my all-time favorite picture book poetry collections. Kurt Cyrus wrote the poems and did the art–not that I’m jealous. (Nope. Not me.) Anyway, this book is a masterpiece. Seriously. It’s one of my desert island picks. In fact, I blogged about it back in 2006 as part of the Wordygirls blog.
The book reads straight through as a set of untitled poems that make up a story about a sardine who loses his school and is alone in the deep water. He encounters all sorts of interesting and dangerous creatures before finding his way back to his peeps. Most of the poems are about a specific animal, but a few are scene-setting poems or plot poems about the sardine. Here’s one of the scene-setters:
| The belch of a blowfish. The bark of a seal. The murmuring turn of the tide. The walloping, wallowing yawn of an eel. The silence of ships that have died. Ripples come racing on crystal-blue rollers With tidings from far and wide. –Kurt Cyrus, all rights reserved Isn’t that mesmerizing? And take a peek at some interior spreads from the book. You’ll see why it’s such a favorite of mine. Paper Tigers has the Poetry Friday roundup today. Sail on over for some more terrific poetry! |
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