My daughter and I recently had the opportunity to try the book and the CD out on our son’s brand new computer.  Using Windows media player which plays the music with accompanying graphics, we listened while flipping through the book.  The CD contains the poems read aloud followed by the musical pieces.  My daughter enjoyed anticipating which animal would come up next by looking at the pictures collected on the front page of the book and guessing through elimination which animal was next.  It was fun to see how image, text and music combined to create an overall effect or sense of the featured animals.  Sometimes, the poems were a reversal of the stereotypical image of an animal.  In “Tortoise” for example, poet Chernaik writes of a tortoise who “dreams of twirling on tabletops,/turning cartwheels,/kicking up her heels at the Carnival ball.”  My daughter disagreed with this picture, but I could see where the music might have inspired the poet’s notion of a tortoise as a dancer, say, in a slow but elegant waltz.  Here’s a video link to the poem and music: Carnival: Tortoise

Animals make wonderful inspiration for all kinds of art — music, poetry and drawing.  Carnival of the Animals is a great book for combining all these art forms to give a child a unique experience of text, image and sound.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Wild Rose Reader.

Millie spots a beautiful hat in a shop window on her way home from school and goes in to buy it – there’s just one problem: it’s hideously expensive and in her purse Millie has… nothing. Hmmm. That could have been the end of the story but no, because the very proper, besuited shop assistant fetches just the hat for Millie from the back of the shop:

“This is a most marvellous hat, Madam, ” said the man.
“It can be any size, shape or colour you wish. All you have to do is imagine it.”

I know this is only a story, but I could have hugged him! And as Millie walks out of the shop wearing her new hat, her imagination takes flight.

Then she discovers that she’s not the only one with a special hat: as she looks around her, she notices that everyone else has one too. There are delightful parallels between what people are doing and the hats they are wearing – and a very special moment occurs when Millie smiles at an old lady whose hat is a “dark, murky pond”: birds and fish “leapt out of her hat and onto the old lady’s”, who we then see striding through the park reenergized with a lovely smile on her face. The final illustration of Millie sitting at the supper table with her parents is an absolute treat too, and will have both children and adults chuckling: but also imagining all the possibilities behind it.

As children turn the pages, their own imaginations will take flight and I can definitely see a new Marvellous Hat game emerging. It would work well on long journeys… So what does your hat look like? And what kind of hats are the people around you wearing?

We are delighted to be featuring Satoshi in our current Gallery, which includes this exuberant illustration from Millie’s Marvellous Hat; and do read Satoshi’s recent interview with Booktrust, in which he talks about Millie and says that he is working on a follow-up – hooray!

Music is central to the human experience and has been bound up with poetry and storytelling since time immemorial. We have brought together an international array of writers and artists whose lives and work have been touched by music; and whose work, in turn, reaches out across geographical boundaries to touch their audience.

As the final words of the opera Naomi’s Road say, “We’ll always carry with us these three things. Gift of music. Gift of words. Gift of love.”

We hope that you’ll find inspiration for all three of these gifts among our website’s new features, which include interviews with Joy Kogawa and Matt Ottley; gallery features of Lulu Delacre and Satoshi Kitamura’s work; essays by Jorge Luján and Michelle Lord, and more. Through September, we’ll continue to explore, here on the blog, the ways in which music features in children’s and young adult literature, so read the new features and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this or any of our upcoming music-related posts!

The title comes from a short, thought-provoking poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Words

Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them,
Fair the fall of songs
When the singer sings them.
Still they are carolled and said -
On wings they are carried -
After the singer is dead and the maker buried.

Set both at the beginning and the end of the anthology, this poem brings the book full circle and each time I read it I feel I am peeling off another layer of meaning – perhaps also because of the other poems in the anthology we’ve read together in the meantime. McGough has indeed been the right person to ring this ring of words – there are poems about everything under the sun, from echoes to ghosts to a cat spinning in a washing machine – all apparently very disparate but all in harmony with each other in creating delightful surprises with words – like Thomas Hood’s “No“, so readable and “modern”, yet Hood lived from 1789-1845! McGough, however, doesn’t give any extraneous information beyond the actual poem apart from the name of the poet – so in a sense it is the perfect introduction for enquiring minds to delve into poetry.

Kitamura’s black and white illustrations shift their style subtly to the poetry – and sometimes add an extra layer of meaning – so for example, June Crebbin’s shape poem “Kite” about a kite getting stuck in a tree is stuck in a tree! It is no surprise when you look deeper into the illustrations to learn that Kitamura won the UK’s prestigious National Art Library Illustration Award for The Ring of Words in 1999.
And so we return to the ring of words and Naoshi Koriyama’s beautiful poem “Unfolding Bud”: yes, you do need to allow poetry the time to unfold -

“Revealing its rich inner self, As one reads it
Again
And over Again.”

And I can see that we will either be hogging this book from the library for a while or we’ll have to go out and get our own copy…

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by The Well Read Child – and as always there’s plenty on offer…

In the gallery shop afterwards, we found a delightful picture-book called Pablo the Artist by Satoshi Kitamura, which is an enigmatic exploration of the artistic process and where inspiration comes from – I agree with The Magic of Books‘ review, where PJ Librarian says “you really aren’t sure at this point if Pablo is dreaming or if these landscape characters are actually real” – it’s one of those books which grows with each re-reading as new details are discovered and absorbed. We especially loved the glimpse of infinity provided at the end, having read The Mouse and His Child so recently, where the picture of the dog carrying a tray with a tin of dog food with the picture of the dog carrying a tray etc. etc. was such a recurrent and pivotal theme.

Not Just for Kids recommends Pablo the Artist and some other picture-books which “introduce young readers to some of the world’s masterpieces”, as does Rhyming Mom.

…And I should just add that Pablo The Artist was one of the picture books nomitated for the 2007 Sakura Awards, which Charlotte highlighted in her last post…