When Green Becomes Tomatoes by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Julie Morstad

April is National Poetry Month, and Julie Fogliano’s When Green Becomes Tomatoes: Poems for All Seasons, with pictures by Julie Morstad, is a book of poems that makes you stop and read each one twice. They are joyful, childlike, and reflect the agonizing wait for sunshine to appear after a long winter.

Each poem is marked with a date. For instance, the poem for April 3 is an accurate depiction of a gray day after heavy rain.

april 3

today

the sky was too busy sulking to rain

and the sun was exhausted from trying

and everyone

it seemed

had decided

to wear their sadness

on the outside

and even the birds

and all their singing

sounded brokenhearted

inside of all that gray.

When Green Becomes Tomatoes starts and ends with the same poem on March 20 in the collection of poems categorized as “Spring.” Spring showers and daffodils gives way to “Summer,” a collection of poems focused on swimming in cool water, fireflies, and tomatoes on the vine. “Fall” is filled with leaves falling, pumpkins, and the first hints of winter. "Winter" arrives in a blanket of white with cozy poems, only to turn into spring again.

Morstad’s illustrations are so gorgeous that they would not look out of place framed on a wall. In a style that is similar to Gyo Fujikawa and Edward Gorey, Morstad’s illustrations are poetry themselves and bring Fogliano’s poems and the seasons to life.

Enjoy National Poetry Month by selecting a poem to read from When Green Becomes Tomatoes, where there is a poem for every season.

This review originally appeared in The Clarion Ledger.

Rhythms and Layers

Kwame Alexander wrote his 2015 Newbery-winning novel The Crossover in poems that slip off the tongue effortlessly. The emphasis of the all caps and the line breaks assure even those who hesitate to read passages aloud that they will read (and sometimes shout) the lines properly from the start.

2015 Newbery winner Kwame Alexander
Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

As with any great long poem, the novel's multiple meanings begin to emerge as the story progresses. The crossover move ("in which a player dribbles/ the ball quickly/ from one hand/ to the other./ As in: When done right,/ a crossover can break/ an opponent's ankles"), narrator Josh's signature play, takes on diverse aspects of crossing a threshold (from childhood to adulthood, life and death) over the course of the novel. The 10 rules of basketball that twins Josh and JB's father reinforce in them apply as much to life as they do to the game. The dreadlock incident (in which JB bets Josh that if JB can score the last basket of the game, he can cut off Josh's dreads--Josh agrees to one, JB cuts five, then their mother makes Josh slash the rest) hits Josh nearly as hard as it did Samson. The incident begins an escalation of his sense of loss and betrayal.

As Josh's rift widens with JB, who's not just his identical twin, but also his best friend, Josh is in danger of a spiral downward, and his parents won't allow it. Kwame Alexander told Karin Snelson in an interview for Shelf Awareness that he almost didn't keep the parents in the book. "In a lot of middle-grade and YA fiction the parents are done away with so that you can focus on the kids," he said. "My familial bonds were always extremely important, so that was my frame of mind at first. But as I wrote the book, I got caught up in this notion that the parents can't be that instrumental. And so the parents were introduced in the book, but they were just sort of there. I told myself, you have a loaded gun, but you haven't fired it. What's the point of introducing these strong parents if you aren't going to utilize that strength to make the story even more powerful? And once I decided that, I thought, well, that's the kind of house you grew up in, you can draw on your own relationship with your family."

So the final layer is art imitating life. There's no doubt of the emotional truth that informs this novel in verse.

Rhyme or Romance

Kathryn Fitzmaurice
Photo credit: Audie England

In Destiny, Rewritten, Karthryn Fitzmaurice writes about a parent wishing for her daughter what her daughter does not wish for herself. 

Eleven-year-old Emily Elizabeth Davis wants to write romance, like her favorite author, Danielle Steele. Her mother wants her to be a poet, like her namesake, Emily Dickinson. Her mother likes to play things by ear; Emily likes to plan. The heroine also wants to find out who her father is. But his identity is hidden in the pages of a poetry book by Dickinson, which the heroine mistakenly put in the donation pile. She searches all over her hometown of Berkeley, Cal., for the book. But sometimes the facts of our circumstances do not tell us as much about ourselves as our hearts do. That's what Emily has to figure out. 

One entertaining part of the book results from an assignment by Mrs. Mendoza, Emily's English teacher, who asks them each to write "a wonderful, elegant haiku," then tells them to turn to someone close by and try talking in syllables of five-seven-five "to get the hang of it." Connor, Emily's crush, turns to Emily. One of his goes like this: "Okay, how about/ Lacrosse is like branches in/ A fierce windstorm." Emily points out that he needs one more syllable in the last line, so Connor comes up with substituting "A violent storm" for "A fierce windstorm."

Their exchanges convey how naturally haiku grows out of conversation, and also how Emily's attention piques when the promise of romance draws near. Poetry and romance. Must Emily choose? Maybe there's enough of both to go around.

Dive in Deep

Poetry gives us a way to look closely and contemplate deeply things we take for granted. In the Sea by David Elliott, illustrated by Holly Meade, transports us to the ocean’s depths and the seaside that surrounds it. Reading a good poem is like standing before a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Her rendering of a flower makes us see it as if for the first time.

With a great poem, we hear the music of language and apply it in a new way. Like the sounds of David Elliott’s poem “The Sea Horse”: “See the sea horse in the sea./ Where else would the sea horse be?/ For though it’s dainty as a wish,/ The sea horse is, you see, a fish.” In one brief poem, Elliott plays with homonyms (“sea” and “see”), our concept of a horse, alluding to its four-legged mainland counterpart, and also informing us of the sea horse’s delicate beauty (“dainty as a wish”). And who can think of a sea turtle, with its 30-year journey to return to its birthplace as anything other than a “[r]are instrument of nature,/ fair compass in a carapace” after reading Elliott’s ode to “The Sea Turtle”? Some children will ask about the word “carapace,” and those old enough will google it. Because they’ve already gleaned that a good poem is all about the mot juste.

Poetry also lets us grasp the unfathomable, as Elliott helps us do with “The Blue Whale.” The animal’s sheer size, length and heft is hard for adults, let alone children, to wrap their minds around. Elliott’s poem pays tribute to this monumental creature’s presence, not only in its majestic appearance (its “nose an island, a mountain”) but also by its impact through the centuries, as with his mention of how the blue whale “sings a chanty deep and slow/ of winds that rage and storms that blow” and “shipwrecked sailors down below.” He suggests the whale’s strength in battling Mother Nature, outlasting many a human confrontation with the turbulent seas.

It’s a humbling poem and, coming at the close of the book, reminds us of how we fit into nature, that we all inhabit this world together, humans and sea creatures alike. By its brevity and element of surprise, poetry issues a unique invitation to pause and reflect on the extraordinary creatures with which we share the planet.

Words to Keep

Perhaps, like me, you might at first resist the idea of the subtitle for Poem in Your Pocket for Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out & Read, edited by Bruno Navasky. Rip the page from a book? I still grapple with whether it’s truly okay to underline favorite phrases in pencil or mark the margins. Of course, you don’t have to rip out the pages.

But that idea of owning the poem, ripping it out, sticking it in your pocket and committing it to memory—or taking it out to share it with someone else—is a valuable idea. It took me a long time to feel as if I “owned” a book, that it was truly mine, to mark up and dog-ear. It’s still easier for me to take a pencil to a set of galleys or a paperback than a hardcover. But part of the fun is revisiting where I’ve been. The notes I made in the margins of my books in college are fun to look back on now. Do the same passages move me today that moved me then?

In his acceptance speech for the Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry for Guyku: A Book of Haiku for Boys, poet Bob Raczka said that he often goes back to the words of Mary Oliver:

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

At the risk of sounding a refrain, allow me to repeat: that’s what poetry does best. It teaches us to live in the moment, to see things anew. I’m taken with May Swenson’s “Analysis of Baseball” (in Poem in Your Pocket) because she drills down to the game’s essence, the relationship between bat, ball, and mitt. She invites us to review our own experience of the game and see if her observations match up with ours. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but during that time of reflection, we relive some great moments in baseball and sharpen our minds.

If you are not already a poetry lover, I’m betting that Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Connie Schultz can convert you with this week’s piece, “The Familiarity of a Poem.” She admits, “I was in my 40s before I was willing to share my love of poetry.” Now she has a poem delivered to her inbox every Monday. If you’re already a poetry convert, you likely know about Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which offers a new poem every day. (Today’s poem is by William Wordsworth.)

Like Schultz, I, too, bristle at the idea of relegating Black History or Women’s History or Poetry to one month out of an entire year. But if that monthly theme grabs the attention of just one person and opens his or her eyes to a fact or a person or an event or a poem that he hadn’t known about before, then I’m all for it. Then let the newly anointed come along with the converted among us, who celebrate all year long.

A Nature Celebration

Poetry is about savoring the moments. Haiku celebrates moments to be savored in nature. Bob Raczka’s Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys, illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds, captures small events worth celebrating: the discovery of a penny on the train tracks, the decision not to put worms on the fish hook but to use hot dogs instead, the realization that the temperature is warm enough so the snowman won’t hold his form—spring has arrived. Raczka and Reynolds conjure moments so specific that they become universal experiences of childhood. We can all relate to and connect with them. Raczka wrote a stirring acceptance speech when he won the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award at the Bank Street College of Education about preserving the sanctity of childhood play, outside in nature.

I love that Raczka says in the title that this is a book for boys. Love that Dog by Sharon Creech stars a boy who comes to love (and write) poetry. Often a boy’s instinctive response to poetry is “ewww.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. Raczka and Creech make a great case to boys that poetry is written for them, too. (Girls will also enjoy these, but they also tend not to be put off by poetry. By the way, Raczka assures us that he is working on a book of haiku for girls next: Herku? Galku?)

Poems are a way of rediscovering the familiar. What a cool idea—that you can be an explorer in your own backyard or the woods down the street or the pond by the school. Yes. That is the gift of poetry. The best poetry inspires you to see the world differently and to write about it, too. So here’s my advice, via one of my favorite poets, Karla Kuskin:

Write about a radish.
Too many people write about the moon.

The night is black
The stars are small and high
The clock unwinds its ever-ticking tune
Hills gleam dimly
Distant nighthawks cry.
A radish rises in the waiting sky.

(from Moon, Have You Met My Mother? by Karla Kuskin [HarperCollins])

Griefstricken

Grief is such an all-consuming experience. When grief strikes, the ground shifts like an earthquake, and then the tremors continue for days, weeks, months, often when we least expect them. It’s hard to see or hear anyone or anything else. Jandy Nelson captures that experience so beautifully in The Sky Is Everywhere when Lennie says, “It’s as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.” When her sister, Bailey, dies, Lennie looks for ways to feel intense alternative emotions, like getting involved with her sister’s boyfriend, and then creating a love triangle with Joe Fontaine—and shutting out everyone else. And then there’s that feeling of, why do I deserve to make a life when my sister’s has ended?

All of us who have lost someone close to us know that the intensity of the feelings may lessen with time, but the feeling of loss never really goes away. We just learn how to carry that person with us. Lennie does it through her poems to her sister, set adrift in the river or aloft on a breeze. We find ways to honor their spirit, the music they loved, the dreams they dreamed. The tension in The Sky Is Everywhere resides in the question of whether or not Lennie will allow herself to pursue the music she herself loves and her own dreams.

When my mother died, a friend who had also lost her mother told me, “It’s like living underwater.” And it was. It felt like everything was happening at a remove. I could see that the world was still spinning and that life was going on around me, but I felt separated from all of it. Gradually, I surfaced again, but it took time, and everything was different when I did. In The Sky Is Everywhere, we watch Lennie during her underwater period—loving and laughing but at a remove, seemingly unaware of the consequences of her actions. And then we see her come to the surface. It’s how she gets there that makes Lennie’s story such a moving and healing experience.

The Read-Aloud Streak

For those of you who’ve been following along for awhile, you already know how passionately I believe in reading aloud together.

I’m privileged to serve on the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee, and one of the great pleasures I derive from the many hours we spend together discussing books is when one of the members says, “Just listen to the language here,” or “look how playful the rhythms are in this section,” and he or she proceeds to read aloud the author’s words. To sit back and let the words wash over me is sheer heaven. I have never outgrown it. And if you are truly honest with yourself, you haven’t outgrown it either. There is nothing like the sound of a true storyteller’s voice.

That brings me to the piece I discovered in last Sunday’s New York Times. A father and daughter had started what they deemed, “The Streak”—a read-aloud streak. Kristen and Jim Brozina began to read aloud together on November 11, 1997, when Kristen was in fourth grade, and read for 3,218 straight nights until her first day of college. At a time when their family’s composition was changing (Kristen’s mother left the family, and her older sister left for college), this father-daughter read-aloud ritual became a stabilizing force for them both.

And what did I think of? Another parent and child who share a love of books and, more specifically, poetry: Julie Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton. They share a love of writing poetry, too, and include some of their own works in Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies, illustrated by the wonderful James McMullan. Music is another powerful way into words and literacy, too, and the mother-daughter selectors include a wide range of song lyrics, not only diverse in their uplifting or melancholy tones, but also in their level of sophistication. There is plenty here for the entire family to enjoy.

Who knows, as you gather next week for Passover or Easter, you may be inspired to start a “Streak” of your own…

Rhyme Time

Few things give me as much pleasure as words put together well and in surprising combinations.

Perhaps that’s why I’m continually attracted to poetry. Button Up!: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle, illustrated by Petra Mathers, delighted me when I first read it because I’d never read a collection narrated by shoelaces, soccer jerseys and jammies, for one thing. Nor had I considered just how early we begin to think of clothes as an indication of who we are and what we do.

These poems can be enjoyed by youngest readers, all of whom can see at a glance just how cool Bertie is by his sunglasses, or how sleepy Joshua looks in his jammies, or what a call to action “Bill’s Blue Jacket” is, by its pounding beat and its invitation to step outside and see the world.

Poems—especially poems for children—can be deceiving in their simplicity. I know I’m jumping the gun a bit—Poetry Month officially begins in April—but good poetry must be read all year round. I subscribe to “The Writer’s Almanac” so that a poem arrives every morning in my e-mailbox. And luckily, the clothes that narrate the poems in Button Up! can be “worn” in all seasons.