Lovely Reader, Meter Made

April is National Poetry Month. Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the monthlong series of events is intended to spur schools, libraries, publishers, booksellers and literary organizations around the country to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. In keeping with that tradition, Somesville poet Carl Little, Stockton Springs writer Donna Gold and University of Maine English instructor Dana Wilde offer their takes on just a few of the new offerings from Maine’s community of poets and illustrators of poetry.

The Panther

The panther is like a leopard,

Except it hasn’t been peppered.

Should you behold a panther crouch,

Prepare to say Ouch.

Better yet, if called by a panther,

Don’t answer.

? Ogden Nash

BIG, BAD, AND A LITTLE BIT SCARY: Poems That Bite Back, illustrated by Wade Zahares, 2001, Viking, New York, hardback, $16.99.

Young children adore poems. For them, a poem is like turning language into a toy. They love the idea of rhyme, the joy of jumping from one word to the other, of stringing nonsense syllables along, bump after dump after gump with nothing to link them but silliness and sound. Rhythm just adds to the fun, like a dance bouncing from one line to another, one page to another.

Equaling children’s love of poetry is their fascination with monsters and bad, really bad, things. It brings them a rest from their struggle to be good, gives their inner monster something to reach out to.

So what could be better than a book of poems about bad things?

A book of funny poems about bad things?

You got it.

“Big, Bad and a little bit Scary” is a collection of some very funny odes to the real live monsters of this world, the crocodile and shark, octopus and panther, illustrated by artist Wade Zahares, who lives in the York County town of Lyman. Kids will love the humor, the rhymes, the critters and the drawings, which are large-scale, richly colored and delightfully sly, putting you eye to eye with the vulture, within a scale’s breadth of holding hands with the alligator.

These illustrations are like having an IMAX movie right in your lap. They’re large. They’re scary. They’re fast moving. And you get right into them. The octopus is so close you don’t see its head, just those very scary tentacles. Timid children might even fear that they could tumble into the black mouths of the piranha. Before they laugh, they might just shudder at the accompanying poem by Dick King-Smith, called “Strippers” rhyming piranha with banana: “If you fall into a river that’s full of Piranha / They’ll strip off your flesh like you’d skin a banana./There’s no time for screaming, there’s no time for groans. In forty-five seconds you’re nothing but bones.”

But oh, to face such fear as the white teeth of the piranha and laugh at it! What power!

The poems are wide-ranging. There’s the tried and true, like Ogden Nash’s word-stretching ode to the panther: “The panther is like a leopard / Except it hasn’t been peppered. Should you behold a panther crouch, / Prepare to say Ouch. / Better yet, if called by a panther, / Don’t anther.”

There are also poems by poets known more to adults, such as Maxine Kumin and D.H. Lawrence, whose description of the bat, “a twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight,” carries deeply satisfying language. Children will appreciate Lawrence’s building of tension even though it’s not nearly as humorous as Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale about the vulture, who “eats between his meals / And that’s the reason why / He very, very rarely feels / As well as you and I.”

Zahares, who graduated from Kennebunk High School, works in pastels, typically creating fairly large images featuring odd angles. Currently, he has a piece on exhibit in the show at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., called “Landscapes Seen and Imagined: Sense of Place.”

Since 1998, Zahares has also been producing children’s books, always with bold illustrations that take an uncommon view of things, making his illustrations a great fit for this book of poems. Other books by Zahares include “Window Music,” with text by Anastasia Suen, which made the New York Times’ Top 10 list of illustrated books in 1998, “Delivery,” also by Suen and filled with rollicking pictures to satisfy a child’s fascination with trucks, and last fall’s “Red are the Apples” by Marc Harshman featuring apple orchards like the one Zahares himself tends.

“Big, Bad and a Little Bit Scary” is geared for young children, ages 5 and up. I bet your older ones won’t mind taking a peek, either, this one’s such fun. I’d recommend it for any time of the year, but with April being National Poetry Month, you’ll be in good company if you read it right now.