Hello, I'm Richard Nimz, prospector of the written word and literary explorer extraordinaire. Alright, coming into the home stretch now, now it's time for poetry. Yeah, the genre is often considered fluff bar a few classics, but, as with video games, it's unfair to dismiss the whole genre out of hand. Case in point: today's selection, which features a new kind of poem that should impress even those most convinced of poetry's uselessness. Ladies and gentlemen: Mirror Mirror, by Marilyn Singer.
Citation: Singer, Marilyn (2010).
Mirror Mirror: a Book of
Reversible Verse. New York: Dutton
Children’s Books.
Summary: On the surface, this is just like any old book of fairy tale poetry with pretty illustrations. However, all of them are told in reversos, a set of two poems, both having the same lines, but one putting all those lines in reverse order. As a result, the same words tell two different sides of the story, Little Red Riding Hood's and the Big Bad Wolf's, Cinderella's and her Prince's.
Impressions: Clever idea. The art is your standard pastel painting (which is beautiful) and the subject matter is pretty standard for the age group, this lets the new style stand out. The poetry itself is fine on its own, but it's the fact that it can make two different related stories just by reading it backwards that really makes it stand out. To borrow from Everyday Reading: "What I particularly like about this is that it can appeal to younger children who just enjoy the pictures and the poems, while older children will really get a kick out of how clever it is to have the same poem read two ways and take on completely different meanings.
I did a pretty fun unit on poetry last year and I'm kicking myself for not having included this title (and style). What was I thinking?"
Yes, this book can be used as part of a poetry display, but I think that it can be used in a broader sense: as part of the Mental Olympics. Using the theory of multiple intelligences, a library can base a series of events around all of the different intelligences, and as part of training camp, this book can be used to help build up the verbal-linguistic competitors. But even just on its own, it's a wonderful refutation of the idea that poets are dumb people.
Auxiliary sources:
Author Unknown (22 Nov 2010). Everyday Reading: Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse by Marilyn Singer and Josee Massee. Everyday Reading. Retrieved from http://www.everyday-reading.com/2010/11/mirror-mirror-book-of-reversible-verse.html
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