Review: Poetrees by Douglas Florian

Florian, D. 2010. POETREES. New York: Beach Lane Books. ISBN 9781416986720.

This beautiful sideways book features a table of contents and a ‘glossatree’ or glossary. It contains eighteen poems on eighteen different trees, from banyan to Weeping Willow, to more obscure like Yews and Dragon Tree. The poems also focus on different characteristics of the trees like bark, leaves and tree rings.

The beautiful color illustrations were created with gouache water color paints, colored pencils, rubber stamps, oil pastels, and collage on primed brown paper bags, according the title page verso. There is also a neat “Author’s Note” included in the “Glossatree”, which cites five different texts Florian consulted while writing the poems.

This book of poetry would be ideal to nestle in with other poetry books about trees, both nonfiction and fiction. As a substitute teacher, I was able to share this book with a group of first graders. Most of them loved the illustrations and the vertical layout of the pages. The huge illustrations were fun to show them, along with the way the words to one poem often spanned two pages.

One of the poems the first graders enjoyed the most was "Weeping Willow". It is as follows:

Willow tree, why do you weep?
Why do you cry and moan?

   All day these caterpillars creep. 
   They won't let me alone!

Willow tree, why do you bend
Your branches to the ground?

  I bend my branches low to send
  Those caterpillars down! 

(Florian, 41)

The repetition of the line "willow tree" was exciting for the kids, and they immediately requested to read it again and everyone joined in. Florian's use of personification and dialogue between the weeping willow and the narrator is genius! Through giving the weeping willow a voice, it really made the poem come alive for the kids I shared it with. The rhythm of this poem also helped the kids to recognize that poems can be fun.

A fun, interactive activity that could be used to introduce this book would be to have the parent, librarian, or teacher bring in various items mentioned in the poems, including: seeds, leaves, pine cones and bark. These items could be passed around to the children so that each could feel the texture and see the colors of these items. 

If possible, the children could take a mini-excursion to the playground or nearby green area to collect these various items. After all of the students have had the opportunity to touch and see each item, they could choose one item to write their observations about. After sharing their observations with a partner who wrote about a different item, they could read Florian's poems on seeds, leaves and the bristlecone pine. If possible, the adult could also provide color illustrations of the various trees that Florian writes about and then move into whole class reading of the other poems about trees. 

Poetrees book cover. JPEG. Retrieved from http://books.simonandschuster.biz/Poetrees/Douglas-Florian/9781416986720