About the Author:
John Hegley was very glad to be given a pair of glasses at the age of twelve - he'd wanted some since he was five. Many years later he worked with two children's theatre companies: Soapbox and Professor Dogg's Troupe, before becoming the popular and highly original stand-up comedian, poet, singer, songwriter and glasses-wearer that he is today. John Hegley has bendy hands and his dog ran away in 1985.
From Booklist:
Gr. 3-6. A British comedian and author of several adult books, Hegley offers an unusual collection of nonsense for young people. Printed on brightly colored pages, the mostly rhyming poems are often skewed, whimsical verses about everyday things: glasses, keys, trees, carrots. Several selections seem off-target for a young audience. In one, Hegley offers a formula for fitting elephants into a car. It's an appealing idea, but the words and images are oddly sophisticated. And there are several bizarre poems about family life that are abrupt, disturbing revelations: in one short, bouncing rhyme, a kid appreciates his dad, but realizes that his mother doesn't; in another, the speaker tries to keep his father from pouring jelly into a mailbox for unexplained reasons. What's best here are the lines of sheer, irresistible silliness. In "Bee Poem," the buzzing speaker says, "I live in a colony. / I like to get all polleny." Teachers will like the range of accessible styles--including acrostic and concrete poems--and Hegley's small, childlike sketches are a good match for the words. A puzzling, uneven collection, but the selections that work are memorable. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.