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leafyshivers's review
5.0
I finished this petite volume in one go. There are only twenty-five small poems, and once you've read one, you'll probably find you can't stop there.
A quiet and satisfying truth lives in each of these poems. They're simple, brief, unpretentious – yet burning with vitality, matching the cover's shade of fiery Buddhist orange. I imagine Valerie Worth siting at her table, or on her front doorstep, wherever, for poetic observation, and I try to feel how she must feel as she looks – really looks, yet looks softly. There is no put-on Desperate Genius in her work here- better - there is dissolution of preconception, leaving room for a fresh breath of reality. She allows herself to sense the true nature of each object which will be her subject matter. And then she takes a snapshot in deftly-angled words. The poems are almost epigrammatic; there is even, sometimes, a hint of Lord Henry-esque wryness (without the cruelty).
Here is one of my favorites, toad:
When the flowers
Turned clever, and
Earned wide
Tender red petals
For themselves,
When the birds
Learned about feathers,
Spread green tails,
Grew cockades
On their heads,
The toad said:
Someone has got
To remember
The mud, and
I'm not proud.
I picked up this book years ago, second-hand, because I was a fan of Tuck Everlasting and thought it was cool that its author Natalie Babbit was an illustrator, as well. Her sketches for these poems are perfect, as unassuming and yet as accurate as the poems, seeming to lend themselves willingly to the essence Worth's text imparts. Her pictures of the shoes and especially of the sea lions are my faves.
I felt like a child, eagerly turning pages, and yet it takes more than a child to truly appreciate this book's value. Whenever I start losing track of what it is to write with vision, I'll return to these poems.
A quiet and satisfying truth lives in each of these poems. They're simple, brief, unpretentious – yet burning with vitality, matching the cover's shade of fiery Buddhist orange. I imagine Valerie Worth siting at her table, or on her front doorstep, wherever, for poetic observation, and I try to feel how she must feel as she looks – really looks, yet looks softly. There is no put-on Desperate Genius in her work here- better - there is dissolution of preconception, leaving room for a fresh breath of reality. She allows herself to sense the true nature of each object which will be her subject matter. And then she takes a snapshot in deftly-angled words. The poems are almost epigrammatic; there is even, sometimes, a hint of Lord Henry-esque wryness (without the cruelty).
Here is one of my favorites, toad:
When the flowers
Turned clever, and
Earned wide
Tender red petals
For themselves,
When the birds
Learned about feathers,
Spread green tails,
Grew cockades
On their heads,
The toad said:
Someone has got
To remember
The mud, and
I'm not proud.
I picked up this book years ago, second-hand, because I was a fan of Tuck Everlasting and thought it was cool that its author Natalie Babbit was an illustrator, as well. Her sketches for these poems are perfect, as unassuming and yet as accurate as the poems, seeming to lend themselves willingly to the essence Worth's text imparts. Her pictures of the shoes and especially of the sea lions are my faves.
I felt like a child, eagerly turning pages, and yet it takes more than a child to truly appreciate this book's value. Whenever I start losing track of what it is to write with vision, I'll return to these poems.
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