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Poems and Poetics for Growing Up
GERALD NOONAN
A Child Growing Llp, compiled by David Kemp. Simon & Pierre, 1979. 126 pp. $7.95 paper. ISBN 0-88924-103-1.
Of Dogs and Cats and Things Like That... Mika Publishing, 1979. 96 pp.
$5.00 paper. ISBN 0-919303-29-3.
Round Slice of Moon and other poems for Canadian kids, compiled by Fran Newman. Scholastic-TAB, 1980. 164 pp. $2.50 paper. ISBN 0-590-7 1029-X.
It Scares Me Btit I Like It, Creating poetry with children, by Russell
Hazzard. Fizhenry & Whiteside, 1979. 128 pp. $6.95 paper. ISBN 0-88902-568-1.
The Stuprise Sandwich, Poerns for children, by Red Lane. Black Moss Press, 1978. 32 pp. $4.95 paper. ISBN 1-887-53-046-X.
Thinking, compiled by Joyce McDonald Moller. City of North Vancouver Public Library, 1973, 1975. 36 pp. $1.75 paper.
We Make Canada Shine: Poerns by children, ed. Peter Craver. James Lorimer & Co., 1980. 30 pp. $9.95 hardcover, $3.95 paper. ISBN 0-88862-289-9; 0-88862-288-0.
Tlze Wind Has Wings, Poems from Canada. Compiled by Mary Alice B ~ w n i eand Barbara Eobertson. I!!ustrzted by E!izaheth C!eaver. Oxford,
- 96 pp. $5.95 paper. ISBN 0-19-540287-1.
The most definite conclusion that emerges from an examination of these eight children's poetry books is that the achievement of The Wind Has Wings, the 1968 prize-winner now reprinted, remains unequalled. Its seventy-seven poems from Canadian "name" poets, past and present, are splendidly presented with brilliant and integrated colour illustrations. (My one quibble is with the decision to print only the first half of D.C. Scott's "The Forsaken"; since the two parts are in tandem surely the reader should get both or none.)
To be fair, a number of other volumes have quite different goals than
Wings. And that brings me to my second conclusion: it must be difficult tc be a child faced with such a confusing array of literature (^) - it's tougl enough to be an adult and reviewing it. Some of the works, like Davic Kemp's Growing Up, have high and discernible staridards. With others, likc We Make Canada Shine, the goal seems to have been self-expression, thc encouragement of children's use of language.
And if you are a language teacher charged with stimulating expressior and competence among the reluctant or deficient (a difficult life too)
perhaps the reading of less-polished examples from pupils' peers is mort
suitable and strategic than the reading of classics in Wings like Blis! Carman's "The Ships of Yule," Robert Service's "Dan McGrew," Georgt T. Lanigan's mid-nineteenth century "Threnody" on "The Ahkoond 01 Swat" -
For the Ahkoond I mourn, Who wouldn't? He strove to disregard the message stern, But he Ahkoondn't.
And skeptics mock the lowly mound
And say, "He's now of n.0 Ahlcound!" -
or the reading of modern efforts that deserve to be classics (also in Wings) from George Johnston, A1 Purdy, Earle Birney, James Reaney, and others.
An experienced teacher, in short, determined to assign some parallel work or discussion, may make much more than this reviewer could froln We Make Canada Shine. The volume is in the Lorimer "Where We Live" series, "a set of beginning readers developed specifically for classroom use" with advice from three cited teacher-consultants. About twenty-five short,
almost unrhymed, poems are well spaced out - no illustration or colour -
on about that many 11 x 8 inch pages - "about" because there are n o page
numbers. (Doesn't that make things more difficn!t in the cl~ssroorr,?)
The Surprise Sandwich is about the same length, in 9 x 7 3/4 inch format,
is also unpaginated, but has longer poems and some colour illustration on almost every page. Red Lane's poems are more ruminative and touch upon more definable issues such as hunger:
And sometimes when I'm eating my lunch I think what about all the people everywhere who have no lunch to eat and maybe no supper and maybe not even a snack before going to bed.
The implicit conflict in equine care raises an issue made more pointed in a
brief dog story by a Grade Eight girl in Bancroft. The dog's owners "grew tired of having to look after me. Now... I have to eat out of garbage cans.
I wish that I had never been born." These touches of sober reality amid
pages of pet worship reminded me, at least, of recent newspaper articles about irresponsible owners and unwanted increases in pet population and pollution. If another Board of Education in a more populated area than eastern Ontario follows Haslings' worthy example - the project is excellently carried out, and must have caused a great outburst of
enthusiasm, writing and drawing in the county - perhaps the enterprise
could be focussed more in advance on, for example, care and control Of
Dogs and Cats and Things Like That...
More advance focussing by the editor or the publisher would have
improved Round Slice of Moon which combines established poets of
yesteryear (like D.C. Scott with "At the Cedars," "On the Way to the Mission," and both parts this time of "The Forsaken"), established contemporary poets (A1 Purdy with "Detail," Miriam Waddington, Elizabeth Brewster), anonymous ballads, poems by the lesser known, and poems by children aged 6, 10, 11, 12. The table of contents is in sixteen untitled subsections, and the organizing principle is not always immediately clear or consistent.
Again, the book could be adapted readily enough I suppose by a
classroomm teacher to suit particular needs. But the editing is unnecessarily quixotic. The volume's title comes from the editor's own poem which is placed at the end of the book and which, in the text, is one of the few poems that is untitled. Another quibble: the Robert Stead whose name is listed with those authors "the publisher has [unsuccessfully] attempted to contact
for permission to reprint" is the western novelist (1880-1959) whose Grain
(1926) and The Homesteaders (1916) are still very much in print. His poem,
"The Squad of One" is in Prairie Born (1911) and in Kitchener and Other
Poems (1917) and itj one soon rea!izes, is Stead's !ive!y re-echn fmm the
prairie of Service's Arctic favourite, "The Cremation of Sam McGee":
There are things unguessed, there are tales untold, in the life of
the great lone land...
Then the Sergeant sat and smoked and talked of the home he had left down East, And the cold and the snow, and the price of land, and the life of
man and beast...
The Stead-Service connection is a serendipitous discovery and welcome, but an example perhaps of how any insights that emerge from the volume will be self-germinated.
The Thinking librarian's anthology, the results from a five-week poetry workshop at North Vancouver Public Library with eighteen children aged nine to thirteen, has a little more obvious direction in its shorter span. Each week a professional writer gave keynote presentations and encouraged the children to explore in words the possibilities of their emotions and ideas. The selections have more consistent quality than the children's work in We
Make Canada Shine or in the more extensive Of Dogs and Cats, although
the latter has superior illustration.
The consistently high-quality material in A Child Growing Up has been combed by editor David Kemp into the most thematic anthology of the lot. The range of contributors is from Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, Pauline Johnson and Nellie McClung, Ogden Nash and Barry Broadfoot to Irving Layton, Dennis Lee, W.O. Mitchell and Alice Munro. The selections from all are in general accord with the volume's subtitle: "A Journey Through The Bittersweet Joys of Childhood Experience" and in accord with ten subsections of the table of contents: "Childhood Innocence, Children and Parents, Child Death, Children at Play, Children and School, Children and Make Believe, Children and Relatives, Children at Christmas, Advice to Children, Child Love." Black and white illustrations introduce each section.
An added touch of quality in the editing, to go along with the tradition and excellence of the selections, is a brief biography section at the back of the book which cites the essential data and some critical assessment for each contributor.
Kemp's book is not the showpiece that is Wings, but it is more comprehensive and solidly edited. Perhaps I like it too because that "bittersweet" note corroborates my bias and the dark misgivings of my cankered soul which prompted me to say at the start that growing up, even with all this poetry to help, remains forever difficult. Somewhere, nonetheless, in this wide-ranging display of wares from the muse, readers will find solace for past ills, balm for the pessimist, and, most certainly, help in fostering the skills and joys of language.
Gerald Noonan, of Wilfrid Laurier University, reviewed an earlier group of poetry books by children in Canadian Children's Literature, 7, 1977.
