Bound To Stay Bound

Bulletin for the Center... - 09/01/2010 What’s interesting about Joyce Sidman is not just her ability to produce stellar, varied poetry about the natural world in volume after volume (Song of the Water Boatman, BCCB 7/05, Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow, BCCB 10/06, etc.), but also to find partnerships with an ever-changing array of gifted artists. This new volume teams a dozen Sidman poems about nocturnally active organisms from raccoons to snails to mushrooms with the work of artist Rick Allen, who offers a sequence of gouache-tinted linocut prints that follows the night from sunset’s crepuscular tones into the dark of the small hours and through until dawn, with the moon moving steadily across the sky overhead. Sidman’s verse is sophisticated yet factual, each poem providing an excellent lead-in for the paragraph of prose information about the featured critter or thing, and there’s an entertaining play in mood as well as in style and form (readers will particularly warm to the light humor of “I Am a Baby Porcupette” and the slightly ominous inexorability of “The Mushrooms Come”). The illustrations balance a three-quarter page image on each recto with facing text and spot art, the latter always teasingly involving a little red eft (a young newt); the graceful rhythms of the intricately patterned lines contrast in the larger scenes with a touch of seek-and-find playfulness as the subjects from previous poems make cameo appearances in the shadowy backgrounds. This is a fine collection for classroom use at any time, but it’ll bring extra impact to those who can find a way to share it at dusk with the lights dimmed, watching through the windows as the nocturnal ballet begins outside. A glossary is appended. DS - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

School Library Journal - 08/01/2010 Gr 3–6—Sidman continues her explorations of natural history in this set of poems about nocturnal life in the forest. As in her other collections, each selection is set in an expansive spread that includes a factual discussion of the featured subject. The illustrations are bold, richly detailed linoleum prints colored in gouache. The 12 poems are led by a scene setting "Welcome to the Night" and go on to feature 9 different creatures and some mushrooms with a concluding lament by the moon as night fades into morning. Sidman adroitly applies varied poetic forms and rhyme schemes. The title's dark emperor, the great horned owl, lends its shape to the one concrete poem, and the closing lament is in the medieval style known as an ubi sunt. The poetry is reflective and at times philosophical. "Build a frame/and stick to it,/I always say./Life's a circle….Eat your triumphs,/eat your mistakes:/that way your belly/will always be full…," advises the night spider. Other poems are playful and some just a bit confusing. The porcupine poem explains that the infant of this species is known as a porcupette; the repeated use of "baby porcupette" seems oddly redundant. The bookmaking is beautiful with the concept of night lending itself generously to poetry. It invites lingering enjoyment for nature and poetry fans, and, as with Sidman's earlier collections, it might be used with varied curriculums.—Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 06/01/2010 *Starred Review* Like Sidman’s Caldecott Honor Book, Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems (2005), this picture book combines lyrical poetry and compelling art with science concepts. Here, poems about the woods at night reveal exciting biology facts that are explained in long notes on each double-page spread. In a poem about crickets, lines describe “the raucous scrape / of wing against wing,” while a prose passage explains that the cricket’s wing has a serrated “file,” which the cricket rubs against a hard “scraper” on its other wing to attract a mate, creating a sound called “stridulation” that can swell to deafening levels. The facts are further reinforced in the accompanying picture, which shows the small file on a cricket’s wing. In an opening note, Allen explains his elaborate, linoleum-block printmaking technique, and each atmospheric image shows the creatures and the dense, dark forest with astonishing clarity. Looking closely at a picture of a snail, for example, readers will see the physical detail, described in an adjacent poem, in the small animals’ moist, sluglike bodies, “riding on a cushion of slime.” The thrilling title poem captures the drama of predator and prey: a mouse in the undergrowth flees an owl’s “hooked face and / hungry eye.” A final glossary concludes this excellent, cross-curricular title. - Copyright 2010 Booklist.