Poems. Another book I got because it came up in my recent subject search. This book is full of quirky, amusing, and sometimes good-life-lesson kind of poems. About things from a kid’s perspective- sometimes ironic, or whimsical, or just thoughtful. Not quite as wacky as Shel Silverstein would get, but I have to say the drawing style and the poems reminded me a lot of him. And I enjoyed most of them, to my surprise. I even read a bunch aloud to my twelve-year-old. Sometimes the rhythm was not quite smooth, they don’t all flow off the tongue easily. Some are quite long and detailed, others just a few short lines, a little observational quip. Disappointingly, the one that grabbed my attention because it happened to be in the jacket description, was a silly short thing about mice roller skating past the traps so fast to nab cheese. It didn’t do much for me. But most of the other poems were much better. There are poems about borrowing an older brother’s bike, enjoying snowfall with a school closure, suffering braces, being afraid of things (like the bathtub drain- the title poem was a good one!) or a scary neighbor’s dog. My favorite was one about sailing, I really love the image that last stanza puts in my mind.
Borrowed from the public library.