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| While I was in New York this past week (more on that soon), I went to The Strand bookstore. I really wanted to buy a book, so of course I?headed to the poetry section, where I spotted Tracie Vaughn Zimmer’s newest collection, Cousins of Clouds: Elephant Poems?(Clarion Books, illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy). |
This collection has so much great variety, with poems about elephants in culture, in religion, in the wild, in captivity…There are short poems, long poems, free verse (mostly), a sonnet, haiku. It’s a fabulous exploration in poetry of these magical animals.
Here’s one of my favorites from the book:
Memory
She detours through brush
to caress the sun-bleached bones
of her lost sister.–Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, all rights reserved
A sidebar about elephants’ emotion shares their celebrations and the fact that elephants often visit the bones of family members years after death. Most of the poems aren’t sad–this is just the one that stayed with me yesterday.
Mary Lee at A Year of Reading?has the Poetry Friday roundup today. Enjoy!