Skywriting: Poems to Fly - Hardcover

Lewis, J. Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568462034 ISBN 13: 9781568462035

Publisher: Creative Editions, 2010

Synopsis

Ever since people have walked, they have dreamed of flying. Prepare to soar in this poetic celebration of dizzying heights and human innovation.

About this title

From School Library Journal

Gr 4-6–Thirteen poems celebrate innovations in flight, soaring chronologically from Icarus to the space shuttle Columbia. Not all of the airborne contraptions were successful, as in the humorous poem “Marquis d'Equevilley's Multiplane”; with an oval shape, “It was not bound/Ever to get off/the ground!” All but one of the poems rhyme, including the shape poem, “The Concorde 001.” The free verse “LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin” sounds more textbook than poetic. Detailed pen-and-ink illustrations with pastel watercolors highlighting the colors of the sky, pilots, and hopeful crowds convey the excitement and wonder humans have experienced in the pursuit of flight. Endnotes offer a paragraph of introductory information about each attempt. A time line with one notable fact from each of the 13 years marked by these forms of flight, from 800 BC to AD 2002, is included. Lee Bennett Hopkins's Give Me Wings (Holiday House, 2010), which also features 13 poems about flight, is for a slightly younger audience.–Julie R. Ranelli, Queen Anne's County Free Library, Stevensville, MDα(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From Booklist

In this picture-book anthology of 13 poems, Lewis celebrates the dramatic adventure of flight, from the ancient Greek myth of Icarus to the Wright brothers’ story to the blast-offs of contemporary rockets, and Kubinyi’s full-page, beautifully detailed illustrations extend the exciting technology. Engineering buffs will move to the detailed endnotes, which includes facts about the Concorde 001 and the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk and helps make this a great cross-curricular title, especially for skeptics who think poems are all about daffodils and nature. Although an accompanying time line isn’t focused entirely on air travel, it does give some context to the facts embedded in the verse lines. In the final poem, the plain words express the engineering wonder of the space shuttle Columbia (“Seventeen thousand miles per hour in just about eight seconds flat / I burn at sixty-one hundred Fahrenheit”) and find poetry in science: “I carry people who like to walk in a wilderness outward-bound. / I am your front-row ticket to celestial theater in the round.” Grades 4-7. --Hazel Rochman

About this edition

• Publisher: Creative Editions
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1568462034
• ISBN 13: 9781568462035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Kubinyi Laszlo