By Bob Raczka
Twenty-four short haiku about the outdoor stuff of childhood, skipping stones, catching fireflies, snowball fights, that make writing a poem feel as easy as three quick lines.
Every poem in this book is a haiku, just three short lines, and every one is about being outside doing the things children love: skipping a stone across a pond, holding a caught firefly up to the dark, packing the perfect snowball, watching a kite pull against the string. Bob Raczka moves through all four seasons, and Peter H. Reynolds fills each spread with light, easy watercolor. The poems are so short that a child reads one in seconds, and so plain and true that they think, almost right away, I could write one of those.
This is the book on the shelf that turns a child from reading poems to writing them. A haiku is only three lines and doesn't rhyme, so the fear drops away, and Raczka's are all about ordinary outdoor play rather than anything grand, which says: your afternoon is worth a poem too. The word is 'guyku,' the frame is a boy's year outdoors, but the pond and the fireflies and the snow belong to any child who has ever played outside, and any of them can pick up the form in an afternoon. Short, warm, and completely un-intimidating, it's the gentlest possible on-ramp into making poetry, not just reading it.