Ordinary Things: Poems from a Walk in Early Spring

A collection of poems recall the sights and feelings experienced on a springtime walk--from home, through the woods, and back again.

Grade 5-9. One season, one slender volume, 33 gently evocative poems. Ordinary Things is a quiet book that begs readers to look around, observe nature, and experience a walk through the woods in spring. The poems are the soul of brevity, often with no more than 12 or 16 lines, and embrace objects as common as birds' nests, birch trees, and a rug of leaves. Closer looks reveal shed snakeskins, ancient arrowheads and fossils, and even a discarded, rusty VW Beetle. Fletcher reminds young people that such a walk can be mind-clearing and therapeutic. "Each footstep is like a word/as it meets the blank page/followed by a pause/before the next one:/step, step, word...." All the senses are at work in these selections, as Fletcher reflects on the "monotonous chant" of frogs, the sweetness of maple syrup, the sight of mailboxes that look like "old people dancing slowly cheek-to-cheek," and the feel of "hot horse breath on my cheek." Krudop's pencil drawings extend and enhance the natural woodland images. The next time readers take a leisurely, head-clearing walk, they may wish to recall the author's observations and create their own.?Sharon Korbeck, Waupaca Area Public Library, WI
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fletcher (Buried Alive, 1996, etc.) chronicles an adolescent's trek through the spring woods and back and yields somber observances of the natural world. In journal-like jottings, wind, rock, fossil, telephone pole, tree, and mailbox are subjects for a budding naturalist's poems. ``Walking,'' ``Into the Woods,'' and ``Looping Back'' divide the musings into three sections. A towel on a clothesline tries to ``screw up the nerve/to let go and/fly,'' birds' nests appear like ``unpicked fruit/in branches bare/of any leaves,'' and skins from a garter snake are ``strips of cloudy cellophane/that let light shine through.'' Fletcher reaches for the extraordinary, but many of the connections remain just beyond grasp and many images are pedestrian: trees dancing, leaves making music in the wind, shoots uncurling. It's never clear why these are cloaked as a young person's thoughts, instead of Fletcher's. A line or two rise above the rest, but these works have little of the resonance found in Buried Alive. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Poetry. 12+) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 4^-6, younger for reading aloud. In Fletcher's poetry, observations on ordinary things reveal more complex thoughts and emotions. The poems in this collection would make strong choices for reading aloud throughout the year. Younger listeners might marvel, as Fletcher does in "Birds' Nests," when his grandmother throws some of his freshly cut hair on the ground outside so that later the hair could be "woven into a bird's wild tapestry." Older readers may understand the desire to look for arrowheads while out walking: to "hold one in my hand / I want to touch the tip of history." Karen Morgan