Walker My Dog Is A Carrot

Enter the celebrated poet's weird, witty, bespectacled world and meet the organic leek who has learned to speak, the octopus who gets a nasty shocktopus, the man who drew his cornflakes and a whole cast of other interesting characters. Surprising, serious, and sometimes just plain silly, this is a collection of poems even your dog might like. Unless your dog is a carrot too. Editorial Reviews From School Library Journal Grade 4-6-This British songwriter with a background in children's theater creatively plays with language in 49 short poems. Topics include pets, eyeglasses, kissing, school, and family. Blank verse dominates, but a few concrete poems and an acrostic add interest to the collection. Comic line drawings and occasional, brilliant splashes of plaid, pink, orange, or blue pump up the visual interest. The wit sashays from droll ("A comparison of logs and dogs": "both are very popular at Christmas/but it is not generally considered cruel/to abandon a log/and dogs are rarely used as fuel") to simply odd ("Loaf poem": "I bought a loaf the other day/it came to life and ran away./And I said,/`Naughty bad bread./NAUGHTY'"). Offer this title to readers pleased with wordplay and to those with an ability to appreciate unusual humor. Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist Gr. 3-6. A British comedian and author of several adult books, Hegley offers an unusual collection of nonsense for young people. Printed on brightly colored pages, the mostly rhyming poems are often skewed, whimsical verses about everyday things: glasses, keys, trees, carrots. Several selections seem off-target for a young audience. In one, Hegley offers a formula for fitting elephants into a car. It's an appealing idea, but the words and images are oddly sophisticated. And there are several bizarre poems about family life that are abrupt, disturbing revelations: in one short, bouncing rhyme, a kid appreciates his dad, but realizes that his mother doesn't; in another, the speaker tries to keep his father from pouring jelly into a mailbox for unexplained reasons. What's best here are the lines of sheer, irresistible silliness. In "Bee Poem," the buzzing speaker says, "I live in a colony. / I like to get all polleny." Teachers will like the range of accessible styles--including acrostic and concrete poems--and Hegley's small, childlike sketches are a good match for the words. A puzzling, uneven collection, but the selections that work are memorable. Gillian Engberg Copyright å© American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.