Take Off Your Brave: The World Through the Eyes of a Preschool Poet

PreS-Gr 3--A series of poems dictated by a four-year-old boy to his mother, and supplemented with poems written by his younger sister and by his preschool class, provide insight into a child's budding artistic voice and elucidates broad themes of the everyday human experience. The clear, expressive free-form pieces examine the cornerstones of a young person's world: home, school, family, friends, sensations, memories, and emotions. Many of the verses reveal that certain linguistic and rhetorical devices typically viewed as intentional components of a poet's craft are, in fact, instinctive elements of human play originating in the landscape of imagination. Nadim employs onomatopoeia (a train ride "Feels like bumpity-bump/ Sounds like chuka chuka shhhh"), repetition ("It's my mom, it's my mom"), personification ("Wednesday wears a shirt with glitter on it"), and concrete symbolism (a mix of nervousness and excitement is dubbed "Scared-sugar"), all with a natural and authentic ease. In mixed-media illustrations replete with soft washes of desaturated color, Ismail locates introspective moments in the text and amplifies them, using them as jumping-off points for scenes depicting archetypal imagery of youth: exuberant dancing and pretend play, exploration in nature, a skinned knee, the peak of a jump-rope jump, hiding in a cardboard box. The treatment of these scenes--busy, but uncluttered; energetic, but never distracting--evokes both the wildness and calm of childhood. VERDICT This unique collection will serve as an appealing introduction to poetry for children: reflecting their daily experience to them, bolstering their appreciation of the written word, and perhaps inspiring them to construct poems of their own.--Jonah Dragan

In an introduction, educator Yasmine Shamma details the volume's beginnings: while inviting her son, then-four-year-old Nadim, to write a poem about coming home from school, she asked him to list the things he removes inside the front door: "You take off your brave," he told her, in a moment of insight that "shared his experiences of the world." These pages collect poems that Nadim dictated to his mother, poems by Nadim's sister, and some by his preschool classmates, too, on topics conceptual, experiential, and social-emotional. All feel fresh, spontaneous, and aware of important truths: "Nothing can make love disappear/ Not spells/ Not magic/ Not mermaids/ Not anything." With a loose line and sparky excitement, Ismail captures children of various abilities and skin tones in uninhibited play--dancing, pushing a puppy in a perambulator, presenting a huge bunch of flowers to a mother. Nadim notes, "Anyone can write a poem if they just put on a paper what they think," and the volume invites children to write their own, as they are. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)