Wednesday 8 October 2008

FBA Poetry

Nye, Naomi Shihab. A. Maze Me. Greenwillow, 2005.
You know when you check a book out of the library and you keep putting off returning it so you can have just one more look at it? This is that book for me. Thankfully, I am the librarian, and so I can cheat a bit on overdues. Naomi's gorgeously illustrated book sat on my bedstand forever and was the perfect poetry collection to leaf through every now and then to find gem after gem of honest, tender, raw poetry geared for girls (but great for boys, too!). A brilliant addition to any classroom or bookshelf.

Here's a snippet of the magic:

Life is a tangle of
Twisting paths.
Some short.
Some long.
There are dead ends.
And there are choices.
And wrong turns,
And detours,
And yield signs,
And instruction booklets,
And star maps,
And happiness,
And loneliness.
And friends.
And sisters.
And love.
And poetry.

Life is a maze.
You are a maze.
Amazed.
And amazing.

3 comments:

Kremb de la Kremb said...

I love this book too! Such a bummer...she was suppose to give us an author visit last year, but then it fell through right up to the Friday before she was supposed to arrive. I hope to meet Naomi some day. BTW, I love the term FBA! That's an ingenious term that I am happy to borrow:)

Popo and Nana and Gong Gong and Granda said...

Okay...this is a perfect "labyrinth" poem too. How beautiful. And a librarian that I know never shared it with me???

Popo and Nana and Gong Gong and Granda said...

Well, not "perfect" but certainly many parts of it are.