Book-A-Day Almanac

For Poetry Month, we’ve looked at some great poets—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jack Prelutsky, and Joyce Sidman—and some individual volumes like Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog. I’d like to conclude the festivities of this month by celebrating one of the twentieth century’s finest poets for children, Valerie Worth.

After graduating from Swarthmore College, Worth moved to Clinton, New York, and met fellow author and artist Natalie Babbitt. Babbitt is one of those dually talented creators who can both write and draw. While penning her classic novels such as Tuck Everlasting, she began contributing simple line drawings to Worth’s poetry volumes, beginning with Small Poems, published in 1972. In 1994 all of Worth’s small poem volumes were pulled together in a glorious edition, All the Small Poems and Fourteen More. If you do not own this gem, run—don’t walk—to your nearest book store. For any poetry library, I would list it as one of the first volumes any family should buy.

Everything about this volume is understated; it sports an elegant and simple design. Even the table of contents is rendered without a capital letter. Worth brings her love of nature that began in her childhood in Pennsylvania to each offering. She looks at common animals, plants, and objects through her particular poetic lens: “Under a maple tree/The dog lies down/Lolls his limp/Tongue, yawns/Rests his long chin/Carefully between/Front paws.” In this poem she has completely captured my dog Lancelot lying near me on the floor! In Worth’s free verse, every word counts. Everything is stripped to bare minimum so that the text creates exquisite and simple “word pictures.”

Many of the poems can be used at various times of the year, such as ones about pumpkins or Christmas lights. For Earth Day on April 22, Worth’s poetry provides a simple yet effective way for children to look at all creatures great and small. Like Haiku, the poems naturally encourage children to try their own free verse forms and to explore their world through poetry.

Shortly before her death in 1994, Valerie Worth wrote an essay for Children’s Books and Their Creators about her own goals and dreams as a poet. She writes, “[I’m] trying to catch hold of things and put them into poems; poems that would somehow express the essential qualities of an object or an experience, so that somebody else could read what I’d written and think, ‘Yes, that’s right. I’ve seen that myself.’ So many poets have done this for me. I’ve tried to do the same for others, especially children, who are encountering so much for the first time and are responding to what they see so directly and intensely.”

Now years later, her poetry still helps children and adults see the world around them in fresh language and striking images. After reading a poem by Worth, I often find myself thinking “Yes, that’s right. I’ve seen that myself.”

Here’s a page from All the Small Poems and Fourteen More: