I picked up this new book, MEOW RUFF: A STORY IN CONCRETE POETRY by Joyce Sidman, last week at Cover to Cover. What a great book. I needed to spend some time with it--it didn't make a lot of sense to me when I browsed. I was expecting a regular poetry book. This one is concrete poems. But the best thing is that the concrete poems go together to tell a story. It almost reads like a graphic novel. As a reader, I had to pull together what was going on in the pictures with the words all over the page.
Different from other concrete poetry books, each page consists of several concrete poems--nearly every object in each illustration has some type of words or poetry connected to it. I can use it with DOGKU by Andrew Clements since they are both stories about dogs talk in different types of poetry. Fun writing for kids to play with.
The pages go together to tell about a new friendship between a dog and a cat. The illustrations are colorful--younger kids would love the story. Older kids could really study the writing and the way the pictures and words work together.
Definitely glad I picked this one up.
I always love finding out about new books on your site. Thanks for the info on these. I'll have to add them to my collection. Do you know if Meow Ruff is available to the general public yet?
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ReplyDeleteMeow Ruff is one of NCTE's 2007 Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts. Another terrific concrete poetry book is John Grandits' Technically It's Not My Fault which we honored the year before.
ReplyDeleteI've a concrete and animated poetry post if you are interested:
http://medinger.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/concrete-and-animated-poetry/
Thanks for the poetry book idea. I love concrete poetry and haven't taught it for awhile. I better order this!
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