‘Crossing’ a railroad romance Author Philip Booth gives kids train ride

CROSSING, by Philip Booth, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline, 18 pages, Candlewick Press, Cambridge, Mass., $16.95.

There’s been a great deal of excitement in recent months about the resumption of train service between Portland and Boston. In a serendipitous piece of synchronicity, just as rail travel was returning to Maine, a handsome children’s book highlighting the railroad appeared in bookstores (including Blue Hill Books where this reviewer came across it).

The author, Philip Booth, a Castine resident, is one of the country’s pre-eminent poets. The poem “Crossing,” which serves as the text for this picture book, appeared in his first collection, “Letter from a Distant Land,” published nearly 50 years ago (it was the 1956 Lamont Poetry Selection, judged by, among others, May Sarton and Richard Wilbur).

Using a poem as a basis for a children’s book has a nice precedent in Maine literature. Samuel French Morse’s “A Game,” which appeared in his book “The Changes,” became “All in a Suitcase” (1966), one of Barbara Cooney’s earliest illustrated books.

The verse is broken into 40 short lines, with an ABAC rhyme scheme that seems to match the rhythm of the train as it rolls by. Booth describes what you would see at a country crossing after the “gate stripes” have swung down and you wait in your car or on your bike or on a bench and count the freight cars. The inspiration for the poem came from the poet’s childhood in White River Junction, Vt., but the actual railroad crossing is based on one in Brunswick, Maine.

B&M, Frisco, Erie and Wabash, B&O, Rock Island, Hiawatha, Lackawanna – the writing on the side of the train provides the poetry. It’s as if the whole country is on parade, from Pennsy (Pennsylvania) to Santa Fe, from Youngstown to Mobile. Cattle stick their big heads out, and there are cars hauling hoppers of coke and new automobiles circa 1950s.

It might have been nice to include some information about U.S. freight service. The Phoebe Snow Railroad System intrigued me, and I couldn’t remember what all the initials stand for (B.A.& P., for example).

Bagram Ibatoulline’s double-spread illustrations recall vintage Robert McCloskey, his country folk rendered in that comic manner we associate with “Homer Price” or “Make Way for Ducklings.” The Russian-born, New Jersey-based artist, who makes his debut here as an illustrator, is a formidable draftsman, giving a realist finish to railcars and figures alike. He is also inventive: in one illustration the lettering is reflected in the windshield of an automobile waiting to cross. In another, all 97 cars (I counted them) form a wide spiral before heading into a tunnel.

“Crossing” is full of the romance of the rails, the kind we associate with Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans.” It serves as a reminder of another era when kids (myself included) put coins on the tracks and men and women watched the goods of America go rumbling by.