Poetry Friday - Not Spring, But A Nest Is Created

     Poetry Friday is hosted by Kiesha Shepard here at Whispers from the Ridge! Thanks, Kiesha for hosting and for those beautiful poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar!  

      I'm thrilled to be on the blog tour for this marvelous new book by Irene Latham! Here's the list of all who are sharing!

  And here is my post celebrating This Poem is A Nest!

         Out September 29th, time to pre-order! Thanks to Wordsong for the advanced copy!

            Irene has created a book as robins create their nests. Piece by piece, she's selected only the parts that hold together, that make a home for her hatchlings, 161 poems found as she traveled through the words (her woods?), and so many other places, with one single poem. In the forward, Irene explains the "how" of her "nestling" idea, to find poems within the poem, a personal found or blackout poetry. Her one poem is in four parts, an homage to the four seasons.

          Within the book, there are also sections, each celebrated by full-page beautiful illustrations by Johanna Wright. These sections fly from ones like "time" and "animals among us" to "only human" and the ending "out of time".  Johanna also adds some smaller illustrations here and there on the pages, like with the poem "Middle of the Night Question" showing a young girl in bed with a dream scene showing her with wings above, a small bird playing a guitar. The poems make our imaginations soar but having Johanna illustrate her own thoughts is fun, too. And Irene's poems are tiny glimpses into life, like finding a piece of ribbon in a robin's nest!

           For those who want inspiration or for teachers who love new ideas to offer to their students, this is a place for nesting, adding pieces of wordplay challenge and extraordinary fun for poets. 

           Irene's forward invites us all to start:

What words will call to you?
What worlds are waiting in a poem for you to discover? What ideas are hiding that you—and only you—
will nurture until they’re ready
to fly right out of the nest into a
new poem?

            There are additional detailed tips about building nestlings from a nest at the back and an index. In those tips, one rule is that your new nestling can only use words from the body of the poem and in that order, top to bottom. Thus, it helps that Irene adds to the poems' topic in the titles. Choosing what touches with emotion, a favorite topic, and special-sounds is a highlight of all. I decided to break Irene's rules to see if I could write only from words in her titles. Here's what I "found":

Inside the Titles

bedtime

middle of the night

before the game

on the prowl

imagination sets in

close-call

windfall

joy

streams

if you

flyaway

poem found

         Do I have favorite parts of these pages and poems by Irene? Yes! Am I going to share what they are? No! You need to get this book and celebrate it for its creativity, its newness, its being a "nestling"! Thanks, Irene and Johanna for this special book!