Hopkins, Lee Bennett, ed. and comp. Days to Celebrate, A Full Year of Poetry, People, Holidays, History, Fascinating Facts, and More. Ill. by Stephen Alcorn. 1st ed. New York, NY: Greenwillow Books, 2005. ISBN 0-06-000766-4
Poetry is not a week long study, it is for every day of the year. As its name implies, Days to Celebrate, A Full Year of Poetry, People, Holidays, History, Fascinating Facts, and More is a compilation of interesting events, quotes, facts, holidays, and poems put together to captivate the reader throughout the year. The collection is organized by month so that one would find a poem appropriate to father’s day under June and a poem about Thanksgiving under November. Each month also highlights a calendar, displaying important historical events and interesting facts, such as flower birthstone. A useful contents page allows readers to easily browse the organization of the compilation, while the multiple indexes allows readers to browse by titles, first line, or author.
Days to Celebrate will find an audience with with teachers and students alike. Teachers will appreciate the ease with which the book allows them to incorporate quality poetry into the everyday routines and lessons of the classroom and students will love investigating the countless facts and details hidden among the pages. Key poets such as Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are featured beside Mother Goose and various anonymous poems. The poems vary in mood, from the serious tone set by “Memorial Day” to the quizzical and upbeat tone posed by “Arithmetic.” Colorful, bold, and nostalgic illustrations add a touch of whimsy to each page and beg the reader to take time with each poem.
“Introduction to Poetry” is an ideal poem to open up student minds to poetry. Middle school and high school students may especially benefit from its wisdom. An ideal lesson would begin with students discussing in pairs and then in groups their feelings about poetry. Then students could reconvene to brainstorm what poetry is and why it exists. After this introduction, the poem would be read aloud. Individual copies could be passed out as a beginning to an ongoing individual project- poetry journals. Students would begin to collect favorite poems that they enjoy reading to add to their journals. This particular project would never involve analyzing the poems, but enjoying them. As an end of the year project students could organize the poems into a collection with a forward, table of contents, and section introductions.
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
they begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
