Dear Wandering Wildebeest by Irene Latham

Irene Latham is an Alabama author who does our state proud.  (I was so tickled to get to meet her a few summers ago!)  She wrote a terrific middle grade historical fiction novel, Leaving Gee’s Bend, as well as another work of middle grade fiction, Don’t Feed the Boy, which is on one of my many TBR shelves.  Her newest juvenile offering is a collection of poetry entitled Dear Wandering Wildebeest:  And Other Poems from the Water Hole.  I shared most of these poems with my children, ages ten, eight, and four (plus a tag-along seventeen month old) for last week’s poetry tea time, and each one that I shared was met with enjoyment.  I think animal poems are the perfect “hook” for most children–they’re accessible, and even when the animal is unfamiliar, there’s usually a natural interest there to draw the child in.  Dear Wandering Wildebeest is a collection of fifteen poems, each one about some inhabitant of the African grasslands.  Included are the titular wildebeest, the meerkat, the oxpecker, the dung beetle, the nightjar, and the lone representative of Kingdom Plantae, the wild bush willow tree, among others.  One thing I like about the poems in this volume is that they’re varied in terms of form:  there’s a triptych, a few with concrete/shape elements, and one written in the form of an advertisement.  My favorite is “Impala Explosion.”  Written in rhyming couplets with each line consisting of two tersely descriptive words, this poem really captures the hair trigger response of the impala to any threat of danger.  It ends like this:

long leaps

athletic feats

 

flawless flight

dancer’s delight.

Included with each poem is a very informative paragraph about the poem’s topic.  (We learned that impalas can leap as high as eight feet into the air and horizontally as far as nine feet!)  The book also includes a short glossary and a short bibliography.  Anna Wadham‘s illustrations are muted (like one might expect in the grasslands) and kid-friendly.  (Check out some from this book here.)  It’s not often that any of my libraries buys new poetry books (unless I request them! 😉 ), so I was very pleased to pick this one up prior to my Armchair Cybils book-requesting spree.  I nominated it for the Cybils, and I definitely think it’s a noteworthy title.  Highly Recommended.  (Millbrook Press, 2014)

Related links:

• Read Latham’s poem “What Rhino Knows” on Laura Purdie Salas’ blog
• More animal poetry:  Cousins of Clouds by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer
• Yet more animal poetry:  Around the World on Eighty Legs by Amy Gibson