Life of the Library

As April comes to a close, our staff reflects on poets and poetry we love–and celebrate–all year long.

A poem and illustration from “Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It”

Laura’s Pick

I knew from the moment this hilarious little collection landed in my lap (recommended by a friendly fellow Children’s staffer from a neighboring town) that it must be my selection this month: Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems by Gail Carson Levine and illustrated by Matthew Cordell. Treat yourself to the delightful backstory of this style of poetry (detailed on pages 22 and 23), devised by the doctor and poet William Carlos Williams and involving stolen plums. It’s hard to pick one favorite from the bunch, so here are two. Notice the wonderfully similar structure of each:

(I will not be reciting that last one at my next story time.)

So next time you have to apologize for something that may or may not have been your fault…take a deep breath and compose a poem.

One of Erik Blegvad’s beautiful illustrations from “Hurry, Hurry…”

Gail’s Pick

Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear, by N.M. Bodecker

If you find an entire collection of poetry a bit weighty, try PPL’s lighthearted picture book, “Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear”. The book consists of a single poem written by N M Bodecker. Illustrations by Erik Blegvad perfectly capture the sly, witty tone of the poem, as Mary rushes about trying to finish all the chores the narrator thinks she should do before winter sets in. A great read-aloud for kids.

Lisa’s Pick

My pick is a classic: “My Lost Youth” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  It’s such a beautiful description of Portland, and so many places named in the poem are still here.

Hazel’s Pick

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, by Kenneth Koch

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is an absolute goldmine of kids’ writing that boasts some of the funniest and wisest snippets of poetry I’ve ever read. Some are totally goofy and meandering, some are sharp and sincere, and many combine elements of both. A personal favorite:

Sonya’s Pick

“Wilderness” by Jim Morrison

This poem really spoke to me when I was in my early twenties.

What do you want?

Is it music?

We can play music.

But you want more.

You want something & someone new.

Am I right?

Of course I am.

Yes…I wanted more. I wanted it all. But I really had no idea what that was. These verses seemed so romantic and adventurous to me.

Let’s recreate the world.

The palace of conception is burning.

Thaddeus’ Pick (in verse!)

“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,” by e.e. cummings

Raminta’s Pick

Fireflies, by Rabindranath Tagore

I grew up in a very literary household full of thousands of books. Over the years, bits and pieces of these books flit in and out of my thoughts. My mother must have had a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Fireflies, as one poem has remained with me to this day:

If you enjoy Eastern poetry such as Rumi, I would highly recommend spending an afternoon with Tagore.

Elizabeth’s Picks

The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, Citizen: An American Lyric, Bastards of the Reagan Era, The Wild Hundreds, Voyage of the Sable Venus, Notes on the Assemblage, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.  Many of the powerful new poems I’ve seen at the library in the last year are in collections that offer voice after voice of poets reflecting on themes of racism, incarceration, loss, social justice and injustice, history, society, and the individual. And more.

A selection of poetry in 2016: The Wild Hundreds: Poetry.

Patti’s Pick

“Waiting,” by Raymond Carver

One of my favorite poems is Raymond Carver’s Waiting, from his collection All of Us. I first heard it at a friend’s wedding, and it seemed to perfectly describe the twists and turns that lead us to where we’re supposed to be.

Samantha’s Picks

My first pick is Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy. One of the reasons I like this poem so much is that pays homage to the unknown soldier, and couples the unknowingness of death with eternal aspects of life and the world. Hardy’s work was also a major influence on Dylan Thomas.

Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front is one of those poems I read when I’m aghast with the world. It seems to offer a guide to living, inspiring, actionable words that help the reader to remember what is really important in life. Listening more than speaking, being happy just noticing the movements of the earth, not needing dollars and fancy vacations to be at peace.

Finally, “Shake the Dust” by Anis Mojgani is another inspiring poem for me. I strongly encourage it to be experienced aurally, like this performance here. Mojgani is so expressive, and his words instill confidence, hope, and faith that every human experience has value, purpose, and importance. It gives me the same kind of foot-tapping excitement that a piece of upbeat music brings, and the phrase “shake the dust” is one I have come to hold as a special mantra for being fearless when I feel the most timid.

Kelley’s Pick

Completely unrelated to anything Teen, my choice for a favorite poet would be Jim Harrison, who died last month. Many people know him for his novels (e.g. Legends of the Fall), but I love his collections of poetry; they’re beautiful, rough and honest. Harrison also collaborated throughout his life with the wonderful artist Russell Chatham, whose paintings adorn the covers of Harrison’s books.

Eileen’s Pick

Good poetry is a subjective label.  Sometimes it isn’t the poem itself that touches us, but the associations it has.

My mother passed away in April, five years ago.  Standing by her grave in the mid-May blossom-filled Mount Auburn cemetery where John Ciardi, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are spending eternity, my sisters and I shared recollections of our kind mother, Marjorie.

The older of my two sisters told the story of her second grade school assignment:  select, memorize and recite a poem, a process that had bogged down at “select,” driving her seven-year-old self to the end of her tightly-wound perfectionist rope as the deadline approached.  In her trademark over-achieving fashion, she aimed way beyond necessity and expectations, fretting and sweating over pieces that were too long, too hard, too everything… until our mother, who always seemed to know how to make things better, offered an idea.  A poem that was not too long.  Not too serious.  Just the thing.

55 years later, in the cool of a spring morning, my sister recited that poem again:

The May 1895 issue of The Lark in which “The Purple Cow” first appeared.

The Purple Cow

(Reflections on a Mythic Beast Who’s Quite Remarkable, at Least.)

 By Gelett Burgess

I NEVER saw a Purple Cow; 

I never hope to See One; 

But I can Tell you, Anyhow, 

I’d rather See than Be One.

— The Lark number 1, May 1, 1895

That is how it came to be that three middle-aged sisters felt the power of poetry; four lines of silliness in the midst of grief.

Not too long.  Not too serious.  Just the thing, like all good poetry.

As always, thanks for reading.

An illustration from “Up In the Garden and Down In the Dirt,” a March Staff Pick.

“The mountains are calling and I must go.” -John Muir.

On days we can’t muddy our boots or turn over logs to peer at what’s there, we’re glad we can grab a book or check out a great film to satisfy our curiosity about the great outdoors. In celebration of  Maine winging back into warm and light-filled days, these March staff picks focus on favorite spring and nature-related library materials.

Children’s Fiction and Nonfiction

Laura’s Pick

Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal

One of the most wonderful picture books I have encountered is Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner with art by Christopher Silas Neal. It is the perfect companion to this Real and True Spring we are currently enjoying (none of the usual Mud Season nonsense, thank goodness). It reminds me of some marvelous advice I received while taking the Portland History Docents class a few years ago: when you stop at a corner or a traffic light, look up! The tops of old buildings are beautiful and fascinating but rarely enjoyed by anyone but the birds. This book reminds us to also look down and all around us. The world is so full of beauty and intricacy, awaiting discovery, if only we know where and when to look. Though this book starts in spring, it guides you through the rest of the seasons of the year with gentle words, great sounds and continually gorgeous art. It is also excellent preparation for our upcoming Summer Reading theme: Time of Wonder, all about exploring and observing the natural world around us. The back of the book contains descriptions and illustrations that could easily be used as a guide or textbook about all the participants in the ecosystem of our gardens. Enjoy and don’t forget to look up, down and all around you!

Carrie’s Pick

Citizen Scientists: Be A Part of Scientific Discovery From Your Own Backyard, by Loree Griffin Burns

Spring is a time for getting outside, digging in the dirt, watching for butterflies and birds return, and looking forward to Summer! Citizen Scientists not only watch what is happening around them, they also record what they see and share their findings so we can all have a better understanding of our changing world.

Loree Griffin Burns’ book, Citizen Scientists: Be A Part of Scientific Discovery From Your Own Backyard, explains what a Citizen Scientist is and then shows you how you can be one yourself!

Using a seasonal approach, with detailed photography by Ellen Harasimowicz, the book moves you through the year with four Citizen Science projects that families can engage in in their own backyards and neighborhoods. Simple, straightforward, colorful, and accessible, this book is a great primer for any family looking to take their daily adventures and observations a step further.

Spring is here, so get out and explore! And why not share what you see and become a Citizen Scientist?

Brandie’s Pick

And Then It’s Spring, by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin Stead

Absolutely beautiful illustrations go along with a simple story about waiting for spring. A young boy and his dog (and a few animals all around them) decide that they’ve had it with all that brown and decide to plant a garden. Then they wait and wait and wait. They all start off wearing red knit caps and scarfs, including the turtle, and by the end they are barefoot and swinging.

I will read anything that Erin Stead illustrates. In all of her books she adds tiny details in her quiet way that requires several reads to notice (the birds that are drunk on seeds, the milk container that becomes a bird house). I wanted to cut the images from the book and hang them on the wall…alas, it was a library book.

An illustration from “And Then It’s Spring.”

Adult Fiction

Harper’s Pick

Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World

In this new collection of fantasy stories inspired by Shakespeare, we are given a special glimpse at the nature of the world through the eyes of some of the bard’s favorite characters: fairies. One of my personal favorites, the mischievous Puck, makes this observation about the mutable nature of humanity that we often resist: “I see no reason why anyone should define themselves by a single flesh alone, when such seemings are always subject to alteration. As well to say a grown man is unnatural for cultivating the beard he lacked at birth as to call you anything ruder than your name for desiring what you weren’t born with. Why should one change be called natural, and the other not? Crowns and shoes don’t grow on trees, and yet we alter ourselves with the wearing of them.” To believe in our own changeability in this way is an inspiring thought, especially in spring when we can see the rest of the world beginning to change around us.

Wendy N’s Pick

Come Spring by Ben Ames Williams

This is an older book which was forced on me by my mother when I was 17…I would like it, she said… well, she was wrong.  I loved it.  And I continue to love it, visiting with the Robbins family every couple of years since then.  In the words of the author, this is “the story of the founding of a small Maine town, by ordinary people, in what was then an ordinary way.”  It is the tale of Sterlingtown, now known as Union, Maine, in the 1700’s.  It is the story of the land and its peoples, of births and deaths, of hunger and feasts, of plantings and wars, of love and strength.  It is a book that speaks to you and stays with you and lets you know that “We’ll be fine, come spring.”

 Film

David Attenborough loves life on Earth.

Patti’s Picks

I would recommend any dvd that features David Attenborough. He’ll go anywhere, do anything to uncover the most interesting facts about life on this planet.

Favorite Attenborough quote, from The Secret Life of Birds: “I’m standing in a cave in Venezuela…”

Adult Nonfiction

Ellen’s Pick

e.e.cummings’ poem “In Just…” has always been a favorite of mine, evoking as it does the childish delight of splashing in puddles (instead of cursing mud season)! You can read the poem at The Poetry Foundation here or check it out in cummings’ Complete Poems at PPL.

 Jerri’s Pick

A book I’ve borrowed time and again from the library is Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study. PPL owns the twenty –third edition, published in 1935. It is still in print – the most recent edition being 2010!

Ann Botsford Comstock was a pioneer in nature education. She was the first female professor at Cornell University (1899) and wrote this book in 1911  to promote & inform teachers about the outdoors. An advocate teaching children the skills of observation and making the outdoors fun, her book is certainly of value (and beauty) 105 years later!

Emily’s Pick

The Knitter’s Book of Wool, by Clara Parkes

Do you remember the episode of Sherlock where Mycroft and Sherlock made deductions about a hat?  Sherlock says that alpaca fiber and Icelandic sheep wool are very similar.  Guess what? He’s wrong.*

Full of passion for the wide variety of magical creatures who turn grass into fiber, Parkes’ amazing book is both delightful and accessible for artists of all fibrous persuasions.  If you’ve ever felt like a kid looking from the outside in to a candy store when terms like “Icelandic,” “BFL,” or “Corregidale” come up, or had the desire to prove Sherlock wrong about the marvelous (but very different) alpaca fiber and Icelandic wool, this is the book for you.  Parkes will hold your hand through the hairiest of fiber festivals this Spring, explaining the nuances of kink, microns, and why a particular skein might be perfect for that one pattern you’ve saved and coveted….

And hey, who doesn’t love showing up a megalomaniac before breakfast while also helping protect nature by saving rare artisanal sheep with our discerning purchasing power?

*While your intrepid writer is underwhelmed by his knowledge of fiber, she is quite impressed by Cumberbatch’s learning to play the violin for this role.

Lisa’s Pick

Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katherine S. White, edited by E.B. White

A compilation of columns Katherine White wrote during her years as Fiction Editor of the New Yorker.  One of the best stories White shares is when she compares the style of different seed catalogs—many of which I still get today.

Sonya’s Pick

Spring and nature obviously bring to mind themes of sustainability. This month I would like to recommend Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities(Urban and Industrial Environments) by Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman, a title from the Library’s Choose Civility collection. This title is a deep and thoughtful guide to how the principles of the sharing economy (think AirBnB or Uber) will affect the spaces in which we live, work, and play. It was named one of the “Top 20 for 2015” by Nature magazine’s “Books and Arts” blog: “In  Sharing Cities, environmental consultant Duncan McLaren and urban-policy scholar Julian Agyeman lay out, with impressive depth, clarity and wisdom, a comprehensive prescription for a sharing paradigm….bottom-up ventures that are digital or based in communities, rather than commercial.”

Elizabeth’s Pick

Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren (out in April 2016)

Strict science is tough for me. As a student, gently confounded by textbooks, equations, and formulas, I felt at home and happy in the writing of nature’s free-wheeling investigative reporters: Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, or Terry Tempest Williams. Now I’m apt to pick up any book with any thoughtful human mulling over any bird, bud, bug, beast, or melting ‘berg, and this winter I was glad to get a galley copy of Lab Girl.

Geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren’s tales of her work with trees, flowers, seeds, and soil (and her adventures with lab partner and dear friend, Bill Hagopian) cheerily greened up my winter world. Jahren’s writing is frank, humorous, and smart. She’s honest about the challenges that she’s faced as a female scientist, and she continues to write about those challenges in her field in other venues, most recently in The New York Times.

The arc of Jahren’s own story is woven through with brief, meditative chapters that explore specific ideas about plant life.  A curiosity-provoker, the book made me search for photographs of a tree at a specific intersection of two roads in Hawaii, reflect on the chemicals that flood our brains, wonder over a millions-of-years-old fossil forest buried in Canada (how did the forest, every year, survive three months of darkness?), and muse on how symbiotic relationships between trees and fungi may be like…my own relationships. Along the way, we also get a proper exploding beaker, the mystery of an opal at the center of a hackberry seed, and a love of science that is honed by years of Hope Jahren’s tenacity, individuality, wisdom, and profound care.

Jim’s Picks

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich

Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire remains THE book on the experience of living in the American Southwestern desert (in my opinion).  If I’m suffering the midwinter new England blahs, I can always count on Desert Solitaire to take me virtually there.

I always think Ravens in Winter was the book that got people to take a closer look at this clever, funny bird.   All of Bernd Heinrich’s books are wonderfully written; you can have a tendency to forget he’s feeding you science.

Thaddeus’ Pick

My book for Nature month is The Stars, A New Way to See Them by Curious George author H.A. Rey, and, naturally (pun intended) comes with an anecdote. When I was a wee lad, I was obsessed with the stars and constellations. I had a glow-in-the-dark star chart on the ceiling over my bed; I had myriad books and movies about astronomy, and I had this book: a wonderfully illustrated guide to the heavens.

However, the first night I stayed up late enough for my father to take me outside into the winter night to see the stars for real, I fell to my knees terrified. It was all just so big, Orion’s Belt and the other star shapes, when taken off the page, and it was dizzying and horrifying to a boy of barely five. I looked, truly looked, at the stars solely in books for months thereafter.

So here’s to spring, to stars, to Orion, and to H.A. Rey, for reminding us all that, while we all have so much to offer and learn and teach and love and give and lose, we are oh, so very, very small.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in more titles like these, click here for “Bird, Beast, and Beyond: Explorations in Nature,” a longer list of new and classic nature-related reads and resources at PPL. You can observe a snail’s life at bedside (The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating). Enjoy a closer look at animals (The Animal Dialogues). Go deep (Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves). Explore nature with kids (How to Raise a Wild Child), reignite your own love (The Curious Nature Guide), or consider the stories that come out of the science on climate change, extinction, and conservation (Half-earth, Betting the Farm on a Drought, After Preservation).