From: kimberly vanderheiden <kavander>
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 97 00:33:58 CST

Hello, I've been lurking for some time now, and I'm enjoying this poetry discussion this month. For the past year I have been compiling metaphoric poems and illustrating the connection between the object of each poem and the image to which it is connected, or technically, the tenor and vehicle. Anyway, I've combed through many volumes of children's and adult poetry collections to find diverse metaphoric poems appropriate and interesting for middle school-aged children, and one book that I was very impressed with was AMERICAN SPORTS POEMS edited by R.R. Knudson and May Swenson, Orchard Books, 1988. I'm not much of a sports enthusiast and I didn't expect to like this book much, but I was stunned by its diversity of subjects, points of view, and authors. The book contains well known authors from Shel Silverstein to Robert Frost, and it tells poems from the point of view of people who are good at a sport and love it and from people who remember playing Little League and not doing very well. There is a good body of women's voices in among the poems, and the sports aren't just baseball, basketball, and football. There's ice skating, skiing, skateboarding, dancing etc, etc. Even though I'm not an extremely sportive person, I could generally relate to the poems in this book. I think it would be an excellent resource for those who like to share "a poem a day" with their classes. Probably many of you know of it already since its copywrite is 1988, but if you haven't heard of it I recommend it. I know it is still in print because we carry it at the bookstore where I work.

Kimberly Vanderheiden kavander at students.wisc.edu student at University of Wisconsin, Madison
Received on Sun 26 Jan 1997 12:33:58 AM CST