Pigeon Post

For many, if not most people in the English-speaking world, Mother Goose is the first doorway into reading, introduced anywhere between two and six years of age. It is where we learn the rhythms and rhymes of the English language and, through that familiarity, begin to navigate out into the odd and uncertain deeps of one of the most gloriously ramshackle languages on earth. Mother Goose introduces us and helps us to become accustomed to the oddities of the language. What is Mother Goose and where did she come from? Why is it that for more than three hundred years, the Mother Goose nursery rhymes have played such an enduring part in the English language and in the teaching of language and reading to our children?

Mother Goose made her first appearance in children's literature in 1697 when the French author, Charles Perrault, published a collection of traditional folktales as Histoires ou Contes du Temps passe: Les Contes de ma Mere l'Oie (Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose). Perrault was the inaugurator of the large literary tradition of collecting and publishing folktales. In this first collection were eight stories including such well known folktales as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Thumb, and Puss in Boots. Perrault's work crossed the Channel at least as early as 1729 and appeared in England as Histories, or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose.

The first appearance of Mother Goose is as the purported author of folktales, but she quickly morphed - in crossing the Channel - into the purveyor of nursery rhymes, only a few of which might be characterized as tales. The conversion from tales to rhymes was firmly set within fifty years with the publication in 1765 of John Newbery's (yes, that Newbery) Mother Goose's Melody.

Mother Goose is a collection of traditional children's rhymes that were in common use in 17th century England. There is no fixed canon and most common Mother Goose collections are a sampler of the larger population of several hundred traditional rhymes. Not all children's nursery rhymes are Mother Goose rhymes; new ones are being written all the time. However, all Mother Goose materials are nursery rhymes.

Even among non-reading families Mother Goose surreptitiously sneaks into the house and into the language of children and adults alike. Our daily speech is chock full of idioms and adages courtesy of Mother Goose. While not everyone will recognize all of these lines from Mother Goose rhymes, most people would recognize most of them. To some degree we all suffer source amnesia (the neurological process by which, in transferring short term memories into long term memory, we lose track of where we first learned something) and it is striking to realize how many common terms, phrases, idioms, etc. are originally from Mother Goose. Just look at some of the more commonly recognized first lines:

A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar
As I was going to St. Ives
Baa, baa, black sheep
Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea
Bye, baby bunting
Christmas comes but once a year
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat
Dear, dear, what can the matter be?
Doctor Foster went to Glo'ster
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost
Georgy Porgy, pudding and pie
Goosey, goosey, gander
Great A, little a
Hark, hark! The dogs do bark!
Hector Protector was dressed all in green
Here we go round the mulberry bush
Hey, diddle, diddle!
Hickory, dickory, dock!
Hot-cross Buns!
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top!
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
Jack and Jill went up the hill
Jack Sprat

That only takes you to the J's.

What do they mean, all these rhymes? That may be the point - they don't necessarily mean anything. They just sound right. The cadence and rhythm of the poems, many of which are almost jabberwockish in their nonsense, is the whole attraction of the rhyme. It is somewhat ironic that we use a text to get our children accustomed to the language that is, to an extraordinary extent, completely unmoored from the common language rules.

Folklorists and anthologists Iona and Peter Opie (authors of such standard works as The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes) were the pre-eminent specialists in Mother Goose nursery rhymes. Here is what they had to say about the recurring effort by graduate students every where to make a name by investing years of research into two or four lines of a Mother Goose rhyme and then writing a doctoral thesis on the race, class and gender issues embedded in Humpty Dumpty, or authoring a book showing that Little Bo Peep was a proto-Marxist.

Much ingenuity has been exercised to show that certain nursery rhymes have had greater significance than is now apparent. They have been vested with mystic symbolism, linked with social and political events, and numerous attempts have been made to identify the nursery characters with real persons. It should be stated straightway that the bulk of these speculations are worthless. Fortunately the theories are so numerous they tend to cancel each other out. The story of "Sing a song of sixpence," for instance, has been described as alluding to the choirs of Tudor monasteries, the printing of the English Bible, the malpractices of the Romish clergy, and the infinite workings of the solar system. The baby rocked on a tree top has been recognized as the Egyptian child Horus, the Old Pretender, and a New England Red Indian. Even when, by chance, the same conclusions are reached by two writers the reasons given are, as likely as not, antithetical. This game of "interpreting" the nursery rhymes has not been confined to the twentieth century, though it is curious that it has never been so overplayed as in the age which claims to believe in realism.

Sometimes a rhyme is just a rhyme.

Many reasons have been advanced for the enduring popularity of Mother Goose, among them:

Structure of the poems and language patterns

• The rhythm of the poems invite a response from pre-literate, pre-speaking children.
• Rhyme
• Repetition
• Alliteration
• Exaggeration
• Exuberance and energy

Participation - As in "This little piggy went to market" while grabbing one of their toes; or riding the parent's knee while hearing "Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross."
Variety

• Humor
• Riddles
• Limericks
• Stories
• Nonsense rhymes

Ease of recollection - Their brevity and rhyme schemes make it very easy to almost unconsciously memorize large chunks of Mother Goose rhymes. This makes it easier for an adult to have a ready rhyme at hand for any occasion and gives a child acquiring language a point of triumph.

Bridge to literacy - Being natural mimics, children can hear and absorb these nursery rhymes in great quantity at age two and come back to these now familiar lines when they have acquired the first rudiments of the ability to decode letters into words. Because the lines are so familiar and so brief, the pathway to familiarity with reading is made that much easier.

In My Very First Mother Goose, Iona Opie cut to the chase and described the enduring appeal of Mother Goose in these terms.

Mother Goose will show newcomers to this world how astonishing, beautiful, capricious, dancy, eccentric, funny, goluptious, haphazard, intertwingled, joyous, kindly, living, melodious, naughty, outrageous, pomsildillious, querimonious, romantic, sillty, tremendous, unexpected, vertiginous, wonderful, e-citing, yo-heave-ho-ish, and zany it is. And when we come to be grandmothers, it is just as well to be reminded of these twenty-six attributes.

Independent of the linguistic joy to be derived from these nursery rhymes, there is also a wonderful range of choice in illustrations. From Kate Greenaway through Raymond Briggs, Marguerite de Angeli, Tomie de Paola, Michael Foreman, Paul Galdone, Michael Hague, Arnold Lobel, James Marshall, Maud and Miska Petersham, Patricia Polacco, Feodor Rojankovsky, Richard Scary, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Tasha Tudor, Brian Wildsmith, to Blanch Fisher Wright, many of the most prestigious children's illustrators have taken a turn at illustrating Mother Goose editions.

Where do you start in selecting a Mother Goose book given that it is likely to be one of the more lasting impressions on your child? There are several considerations. Do you want a collection or a single story? There are plenty of single rhyme illustrated books such as The Cat and the Fiddle or Hickory Dickory Dock. The short well illustrated rhymes have the advantage of brevity and being more of a size to be handled by a very young child. These have a place in a child's library, but I recommend focusing on a collection as the foundation. When you are sitting there with a squirmy two year old, you want to be able to quickly leaf through to a favorite but also have alternates to turn to without getting up and going over to the shelf.

Another consideration is the themed editions of Mother Goose's rhymes that are out there. For example there are tie-in versions such as Big Bird's Mother Goose or Barney's Favorite Mother Goose Rhymes. Alternatively there are those that try to tie Mother Goose to a particular geographical/ethnic orientation such as Babushka's Mother Goose, or Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes. Then there are the themed versions such as The Christian Mother Goose. Finally there are the "fractured" versions such as Charles Addams' Mother Goose which uses the original rhymes but visually interprets them in startling new ways.

While any one of these editions can have many merits, they are not really Mother Goose and should be postponed till later. They are almost as much for the adult as they are for the child in that, much of their entertainment value is dependent on already knowing the originals. My recommendation is to avoid the themed versions and stick to the basics.

Among the currently available editions listed below, I would draw particular attention to Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose by Scott Gustafson, Here Comes Mother Goose by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells, My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells, Mother Goose by Michael Hague, Mother Goose by Gyo Fujikawa, Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever by Richard Scarry, The Jessie Wilcox Smith Mother Goose by Jessie Wilcox Smith, and especially The Original Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright for your consideration. What editions are your favorites?

Picture Books

Favorite Mother Goose Rhymes by Anonymous Suggested

The Green Tiger's Illustrated Mother Goose by Anonymous Recommended

Treasury of Mother Goose by Anonymous Suggested

The Neighborhood Mother Goose illustrated by Nina Crews Suggested

Tomie Depaola's Mother Goose by Tomie dePaola Suggested

Hey Diddle Diddle & Other Mother Goose Rhymes by Tomie dePaola Suggested

Mary Engelbreit's Mother Goose by Mary Engelbreit Suggested

Mother Goose illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa Highly Recommended

Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose illustrated by Scott Gustafson Recommended

Mother Goose by Michael Hague Recommended

Little Robin Redbreast illustrated by Shari Halpern Suggested

Mother Goose Rhymes illustrated by C.D. Hullinger Suggested

The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose illustrated by Arnold Lobel Suggested

Sylvia Long's Mother Goose illustrated by Sylvia Long Suggested

James Marshall's Mother Goose illustrated by James Marshall Suggested

My First Mother Goose by Lisa McCue Suggested

Mother Goose by Will Moses Suggested

Mother Goose's Melodies by John Newbery Suggested

My Very First Mother Goose edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells Recommended

Here Comes Mother Goose edited by Iona Opie and illustrated byRosemary Wells Recommended

Mother Goose's Little Treasures edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells Suggested

Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever illustrated by Richard Scarry Recommended

Mother Goose's Storytime Nursery Rhymes edited and illustrated by Axel Scheffler and Alison Green Suggested

Hector Protector and As I Went over the Water illustrated by Maurice Sendak Recommended

The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith Highly Recommended

Treasury of Mother Goose by Anonymous Suggested

Mother Goose Rhymes edited by Alex Toys and illustrated by Jill McDonald Suggested

Pudgy Book of Mother Goose by Richard Walz Suggested

The Original Mother Goose illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright Highly Recommended

My First Real Mother Goose Board Book by Blanche Fisher Wright Recommended

Independent Reader

The Charles Addams Mother Goose illustrated by Charles Addams Suggested

The Dust Bowl is one of those epoch historical events that is just on the edge of our national memory. The music that arose from it (Woody Guthrie), the searing photos (Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, et al), the literature (The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck) all remain with us but of the people who can tell the stories, those two or three million people that were directly subject to the storms of soil raining from the sky, the three or four hundred thousand that had to abandon all for which they had worked, pack up the family and hit the road to start again; of them there are just some few tens of thousands still with us to keep the story fresh with a human voice.

As we have grown more and more prosperous it is easy to take the current status quo for granted and assume that things have always been this good and things will always get better. And things do get better; never smoothly and sometimes with fits and starts. But the challenges faced and conquered by those that came before us were gargantuan compared to most of what we face today. It is almost inconceivable to us to comprehend competent adults starving to death for lack of food and money, of citizens becoming refugees within their own country. Of being turned away at a neighboring state's border as an undesirable. Yet all that is within our living memory.

What was the Dust Bowl? The Dust Bowl was an affected area of the country encompassing the pan handles of Oklahoma and Texas, northeastern New Mexico and Southeastern Colorado and the western half of Kansas and was the product of three events coming together simultaneously.

The first triggering event was a prolonged drought that hit the country in 1931 and lasted till 1939, initially in the Midwest and the southern Plains but eventually affecting 75% of the country. For all the current apocalyptic talk about global warming, we have already lived it in the Dust Bowl of the 1930's.

The second exacerbating event was the settlement of large numbers of farmers in the southern Plains who then applied traditional farming techniques to fragile and agriculturally little understood new lands. These traditional farming techniques initially produced bountiful crops of wheat but when the drought struck and nothing would grow, the newly plowed fields were desiccated and had no plant material to keep the friable soil in place. The first dust storms hit in 1931, in 1932 there were fourteen dust storms, in 1933, thirty eight.

The archetypal Dust Storm occurred April 14, 1935, Black Sunday and was commemorated in Woody Guthrie's song, Dust Storm Disaster -

On the fourteenth day of April of nineteen thirty five,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky:
You could see that dust storm coming, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track...
This storm took place at sundown and lasted through the night,
When we looked out this morning we saw a terrible sight:
We saw outside our windows where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.
It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and windy storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down the highway to never come back again.

Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
From "Dust Storm Disaster"

With these natural and man-made disasters, there coincided the third precipitating event, the near collapse of the economic system following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression which also ran through the 1930's. Collapsing banks and tight credit fed an insidious cycle of failure where bankrupted farms pulled down collapsing banks and vice-versa.

Three to four hundred thousand people abandoned the southern plains, whole families packed into whatever transport was available, to flee to new lives in other states, most famously to southern California. Neighboring states tried to close their borders to these economic migrants, with Los Angeles stationing 125 of its policemen at the California state border to turn away impoverished American citizens. It was not till 1941 and a Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs. California) in which the Supreme Court ruled that states did not have the power to restrict internal emigration by American citizens.

There were numerous consequences to this massive migration. California was already wrestling with illegal migration from Mexico. The massive influx of impoverished Plains farmers meant that large numbers of illegal Mexicans were repatriated to Mexico, an aspect of the Dust Bowl reflected in Pamela Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising. Inland cities in California such as Bakersfield still have a distinctly Plains state feel to them. Close your eyes and listen to the accents, listen to the music and you could be in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas. Open your eyes and there are the cowboy hats, and the working jeans, lean faces and rough working hands and again you might be in any town in those long ago states.

It would be easy to say the Dust Bowl was an unmitigated tragedy and disaster. But that would be wrong. Tragedy and disaster - yes. But unmitigated? No! It was mitigated by the very victims of the dust storms. Their example of getting up and moving on, never giving in, is the exclamation mark that contains the tragedy and disaster.

There is a quote in a PBS article, from 1935 from Collier's magazine.

"Very erect and primly severe, [a man] addressed the slumped driver of a rolling wreck that screamed from every hinge, bearing and coupling. 'California's relief rolls are overcrowded now. No use to come farther,' he cried. The half-collapsed driver ignored him -- merely turned his head to be sure his numerous family was still with him. They were so tightly wedged in, that escape was impossible. 'There really is nothing for you here,' the neat trooperish young man went on. 'Nothing, really nothing.' And the forlorn man on the moaning car looked at him, dull, emotionless, incredibly weary, and said: 'So? Well, you ought to see what they got where I come from.'"

You can see it in people's habits and behaviors. I see it in my parents, born and raised in the 1930's in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In them and their peers I can see something beyond stoicism when some misfortune is visited upon them. Not false optimism but almost an attitude of being unbowed - they have known of worse things and they will not be beaten down by some trifling inconvenience.

So how can we as parents use the stories arising from the Dust Bowl to teach our children a sense of history, of perspective, of nobility? We are blessed that there are quite a number of gripping and affecting stories that arose from this tragedy and like the people themselves there is an ennobling aspect of these stories. There is not a lot of blame laying or bewailing of personal circumstances - in most these stories people simply get up and keep on going. The tragedy is in the circumstances around them but not in themselves. They are the redeeming grace.

Picture Books

If You're Not from the Prairie... by David Bouchard and illustrated by Henry Ripplinger Recommended Not really about the Dustbowl but about the beauty of the prairie.

Leah's Pony by Elizabeth Friedrich and illustrated by Michael Garland Recommended

What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan and illustrated by Barry Moser Highly Recommended

Don't Forget Winona by Jeanne Whitehouse Peterson and illustrated by Kimberly Bulcken Root Recommended

The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small Highly Recommended Another one that is not technically about the Dustbowl but it does convey the disruption and loss of the Great Depression in a non-threatening way.

This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie and illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen Recommended

Independent Readers

Hoping for Rain by Kate Connell Suggested

Dust to Eat by Michael L. Cooper Recommended

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan Recommended

Leah's Pony by Elizabeth Friedrich and illustrated by Michael Garland Recommended

Blue Willow by Doris Gates and illustrated by Paul Lantz Highly Recommended

The Dust Bowl by Ann R. Heinrichs Suggested

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Recommended

Rose's Journal by Marissa Moss Recommended

Red-Dirt Jessie by Anna Myers Recommended

Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan Recommended

Children of the Dust Bowl by Jerry Stanley Recommended

Dust for Dinner by Ann Warren Turner and illustrated by Robert Barrett Suggested

Young Adult

No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt Suggested

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Recommended

Dust Bowl by Donald Worster Suggested

The circus in children's literature evokes the exotic, the opportunity of escape, the promise of adventure. It is interesting though, that the image of the circus has such durability. The modern circus was the child of cheap transportation with canals, railroads, and highways from the 1870's making it possible to transport the cornucopia of exoticisms from one isolated small town to another. After a span of barely three quarters of a century, the death knell tolled again and again from the 1920's to the 1950's with the advent of cheap individual transportation as Americans took to the road and distances disappeared. Film, radio and then TV began to fill up the hours with the type of entertainment previously only offered by the circus and evolving judgments began to turn a more jaundiced eye towards the perceived exploitation of both animals and the people of the circus, the carnies.

Today a child is most likely only to encounter a circus in their story books - real circuses are few and far between. I think the first circus I ever attended was in Woking, England in the mid-1960's when I was seven or eight years old. I can remember clearly the excitement of such a strange conglomeration of sights, smells and events. The smell of sawdust, the acrid reek of dung of animals from far away continents, the sweet smell of children's treats such as toffee apples, the musky old canvas from the big tent, etc.

There was the rigid attention to all the animal performances. Striking to young eyes were the horse acrobats; four or five women riding white horses around the ring - except they were not riding them at all but rather standing on their backs doing acrobatic tricks. There was the lion master. I don't remember his putting his head in the lion's mouth but I do remember the thrill of the lions rushing into the ring through a special cage tunnel.

Most memorable of all, and for what reason I do not know as in hindsight it does not seem all that remarkable, were the elephants. The ringmaster put them through their paces, doing all sorts of tricks such as kicking a ball, picking up tiny things with their trunks and so on. But what really stuck in my eight year old brain was the sight of the five elephants each and simultaneously sitting their massive bulks down on their respective circular platforms, with their improbably massive forelegs stuck out in the air like a little terrier sitting up and begging.

It can't have been the first time I was thrilled in that awful way as you watch the flying acrobats high above your short self, sailing through the air and being saved from a disastrous fall by the frailest of hand clasps. But it is the first time I remember being so conscious of that awful thrill. For some reason, the high-wire walkers remain most clear in my mind.

Beyond the performance in the big tent there were buskers for pitch and toss, for air rifle shooting, for all sorts of intriguing things in small tents and shelters on the grounds around the main ring. If you were not captured by the shouted pitches, you might follow all the colored strings of lights, so glorious on a beautifully dark autumn evening.

What child could remain unaffected by an event so completely disassociated with the routine of school, homework, and playing with your neighborhood friends. All these were good things of course, but did not hold a candle to that promise of a different world offered by the very idea of the circus.

And then they were gone. The circus left town, leaving only the memories and the speculation and children talking about what they had seen and incorporating ideas captured from the circus into playground games and activities.

I have had the good fortune to see a number of other circuses over the years in England, one in Sweden and a couple in the US. In some cases, they have made the attempt to evolve themselves into something more refined, perhaps "educational" or at least seemly. This evolution has culminated in such shows as Cirque de Soleil. I have greatly enjoyed the two different Cirque shows I have seen and they are well worthwhile on their own merits, but they are not a circus as a child would know the meaning of that word.

For all that a circus is the promise of adventure and escape and the experience of the exotic, it also has, even in many children's stories, a touch of the macabre, the sad, the downtrodden. The circus is one of the most two-faced standards of children's literature. For the very youngest, it is usually all about the adventure and the excitement as for Jill in the poem above. With books for older independent readers and for young adults, the dark side of a circus is more visible.

Don McLean wrote a song, very loosely based on a real event, about the circus which captures that other side, the grizzly side, the freak show aspect with which you are fascinated but embarrassed by your fascination. The Legend of Andrew McCrew is on his Homeless Brother album:

The Legend of Andrew McCrew (by Don McLean)

There was a mummy at the fair,
All crumpled in a folding chair,
The people passed, but didn't care
That the mummy was a man
So tell me if you can.

Chorus:
Who are you, who are you?
Where have you been,
Where are you going to?
Well Andrew McCrew must have lost his way
Cause though he died long ago
He was buried today

Now down on Nightmare Alley,
Where the shady people sway
A hobo came a-hikin' on a salty summer day.
He hopped a freight in Dallas,
And he rode it out of sight.
But on a turn he slipped,
And he lost his grip,
And he fell into the night.

Chorus

Well Andrew had one leg of wood,
The other leg, was small.
But when he fell off of the train that night
He found he had no legs at all
They found him in a thicket,
And the undertaker came
And they mummified his body
For a relative to claim.

Chorus

Well no one came to claim him
'Til the carnival passed through
The carnies took him to their tent,
And they decided what to do.
They dressed him in a worn-out tux,
And put him on a stand.
And millions saw the legend
Called the famous mummy man.

Chorus

Well what a way to live a life,
And what a way to die.
Left to live a living death
With no one left to cry.
A petrified amazement,
A wonder beyond worth
A man who found more life in death
Than life gave him at birth.

Chorus

But what about the folks who live
And wish that they could go?
Whose lives are lost to living
And performing for the show.
Well at least you got the best of life,
Until it got the best of you.
So from all of us,
To what's left of you,
Farewell, Andrew McCrew.

Words and Music by Don McLean

But let's not finish on such a dark note. Young children see the positive and the exciting. Eleanor Farjeon captured the feeling of enthrallment in a poem titled Jill Came from the Fair.

Jill came from the Fair

Jill came from the Fair
With her pennies all spent;
She had had her full share
Of delight and content;
She had ridden the ring
To a wonderful tune,
She had flown in a swing
Half as high as the moon,
In a boat that was drawn
By an ivory swan
Beside a green lawn
On a lake she had gone,
She had bought a gold packet
That held her desire;
She had touched the red jacket
Of one who ate fire,
She had stood at the butt,
And although she was small
She had won a rough nut
With the throw of a ball,
And across the broad back
Of a donkey a-straddle,
She had jolted like Jack-
In-the-Box on a saddle -
Till mid frolic and shout
And tinsel and litter,
The lights started out
Making everything glitter,
And dazed by the noise
And the blare and the flare,
With her toys and her joys
Jill came from the Fair.

What are your favorite stories about this Janus-faced idea, the circus?

Picture Books

Madeline and the Gypsies by Ludwig Bemelmans Suggested

Clown by Quentin Blake Suggested

Circus Family Dog by Andrew Clements and illustrated by Sue Truesdell Suggested

Andy and the Lion by James Daugherty Recommended

The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola Suggested

If I Ran the Circus by Dr. Seuss Recommended

Circus by Lois Ehlert Recommended

Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer Recommended

Sidewalk Circus by Paul Fleischman and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes Recommended

Bearymore by Don Freeman Suggested

Spot Goes to the Circus by Eric Hill Suggested

Harold's Circus by Crockett Johnson Suggested

The Circus Is Coming by Hilary Knight Suggested

Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire Suggested

Mirette on the High Wire by Emily Arnold McCully Recommended

Moses Goes to the Circus by Isaac Millman Suggested

Emeline at the Circus by Marjorie Priceman Suggested

See the Circus by H. A. Rey Suggested

Circus Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina Suggested

Peter Spier's Circus by Peter Spier Recommended

House on East Eighty-Eighth Street by Bernard Waber Highly Recommended

Circus Parade by Harriet Ziefert and illustrated by Tanya Roitman Suggested

Independent Reader

Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Circus Clown by David A. Adler and illustrated by Susanna Natti Suggested

Secret Heart by David Almond Suggested

Tents, Tigers, And the Ringling Brothers by Jerold W. Apps Suggested

The Circus of Adventure/the River of Adventure by Enid Blyton Suggested

Paddington Bear at the Circus by Michael Bond and illustrated by R. W. Alley Suggested

Clifford at the Circus by Norman Bridwell Suggested

The Circus Scare by Carolyn Keene and illustrated by Macky Pamintuan Suggested

Saving Lilly by Peg Kehret Recommended

Pippi Goes to the Circus by Astrid Lindgren and illustrated by Michael Chesworth Suggested

The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean Recommended

Miss Bindergarten Plans a Circus With Kindergarten by Joseph Slate and illustrated by Ashley Wolff Recommended

When the Circus Came to Town by Laurence Yep and illustrated by Suling Wang Suggested

Young Adult

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury Recommended

The Circus In Winter by Cathy Day Suggested

Under the Big Top by Bruce S. Feiler Suggested

Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence Suggested

Slow Dollar by Margaret Maron Suggested

The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan Suggested

Billy Creekmore by Tracey Porter Suggested

The Blue Moon Circus by Michael Raleigh Suggested

The Aerialist by Richard Schmitt Suggested

Mother Goose is a great place to start to introduce children to poetry (see poetry booklist) and can be begun at the tenderest of years. It is never too early to start introducing children to the rhythms and rhymes of the language delivered in the cadences of their parent's voice. The phrase Mother Tongue begins to fall into place when you think along those lines.

By two or three years of age though, and sometimes even sooner, it is perfectly appropriate to begin reading longer poems, playful poems, poems that tell a story. By this means poetry is understood, or really is felt, as a natural form of communication. I am afraid many children never get introduced to the forms and strictures of poetry till way too late - at which point, poetry is some sort of desiccated art form from which all life has been sucked. Something for the museum and not of the heart. It becomes an arcane exercise and they miss the pleasure and the comprehension that comes when your ear has been well tuned from the beginning.

Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature because, before the advent of writing, if one were to record a story, it was done orally and had to come from memory. Consequently the bards used the full range of mnemonic devices - rhythm, rhyme, stock phrases and descriptions, sectioning into digestible chunks, i.e. verses, standard meters, etc.

There was no children's poetry per se, but one can picture everyone sitting around the fire listening to the bard recite stories from generations before, stories of Gilgamesh, of Beowulf and Grendel, of Osiris and Seti, of Adam and Eve, of Odysseus and Achilles, all the old epics which were poetry.

Even as I write this, as much poetry as I have read to the kids over the years, it occurs to me that I have never read any of these epics around a campfire in the dark. I need to give that a try at the next boy scout camp out. Beowulf would seem especially appropriate.

Because these early pre-literacy stories were so dependent on memory and the mnemonic tricks to facilitate recollection, poetry followed very defined patterns. That is part of the magic of poetry - you are forced into an unnatural level of creativity to stay within the boundaries of the form.

The evolution of "children's" poetry is a late development in our five thousand year stretch of literacy and is customarily deemed to have begun to emerge as a distinct genre with the non-sense poems Edward Lear and of Lewis Carroll. Wherever you draw the line for the beginning, it is all relatively recent.

There are probably three groups of poems that one can identify with children. The first we covered in the Pigeon Post essay of a couple of weeks ago - Mother Goose and Nursery Rhymes. These of course reach back to the 1700's and are a magnificent warehouse of folk wisdom, but also of snippets of rhyme and rhythm - not all of which make any sense.

The second class of poems are those written explicitly with children in mind; Lear and Carroll both being early practitioners. Then there are the poems that are not written for children per se but have ended up being kidnapped by children. Kipling with If or Tennyson with Charge of the Light Brigade are examples as would be T.S. Eliot with his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and Edgar Allan Poe with his The Raven. The music of their rhythm and rhyme is too good for just parental ears and children adopt these poems for their own.

Poetry books can be divided simplistically into anthologies and single poet collections. I would strongly advocate that for the early years, you go with an anthology. Your child is changing fast as are the things they are interested in. You want to be able to fish around among a large variety of styles and forms of poetry at any given time. There is no avoiding a shot gun approach to find that which rings true with them at a particular moment. There are a couple of exceptions to this general rule. Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses is almost certainly a must have for any child's library of poetry.

By five or six, I would suggest making sure that whatever collection you are using includes poems that tell a story. Tales such as Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride, Hiawatha, or The Wreck of the Hesperus, Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman, Walter Scott's Lochinvar, Edward Lear's Owl and the Pussycat or The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Louis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter, etc. Many of these longer poems have been rendered as stand-alone books, often with wonderful illustrations.

At all the ages, but especially the younger years, it is valuable to have a well illustrated anthology. Long before they can read, children will love to sit in your lap and hear the poems and the stories but they especially love to let their eyes feast on some colorful and captivating picture while they hear the story. It is amazing to me how much sticks from these early years. Every now and then I will hear one of our kids, apropos something in the conversation, throw out a line of a poem that I know we read to them years ago. I know the line, but would never have remembered it - their young, plastic minds are far better at holding and retrieving than I think we give them credit for.

Robert Louis Stevenson has a lovely poem that encapsulates the ability of a story to become the whole world of a child's imagination.

The Land of Story Books By Robert Louis Stevenson

At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter's camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

I know I have been listing mostly only well-known classics here, but there are many wonderful contemporary or near contemporary authors as well. Of course Shel Silverstein but also Charles Causley, Ogden Nash, Jack Prelutsky and many others. Among poets writing principally for adults, W.H. Auden has a good number of poems well attuned to young ears as does Billy Collins, our former US Poet Laureate.

One of the difficult aspects of selecting any anthology is guarding against the expectation that a child will like all the poems. I think the very best we have ever done is one particular collection, A Children's Book of Verse illustrated by Eric Kinkaid and selected by Marjorie Rogers. It is a marvelous collection but even so, any one of our three children at most likes about half the poems. It is just the nature of the beast and my experience is that usually you are doing pretty well if you find you are reading a third of the poems in a collection.

One of the challenges as a parent in finding good poetry books is that poetry is perhaps the most delicate flower in the literary garden. There is no field more overpopulated with literary weeds. Everyone and their brother considers themselves to be a poet and there are far more poems to be read than there are readers of poetry. Thomas Macaulay had a particularly jaundiced view - "As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

Another challenge is that even more than children's literature itself, poetry collections seem to attract well-meaning attempts to make the collection "topical" or "relevant". In an already rarified genre, you have specialized collections about particular animals or regions or themes or ethnicities. Well meaning but, apart from some animal collections, I have never seen any of these taken to heart by a child. They serve more the moral or pedagogical interests of the adult than the reading interests of the child.

Yet a further challenge is that, as the market for children's poetry is pretty small, anthologies come and go out of print very rapidly. You can find a wonderful anthology today and five years from now you are scavenging the dusty bookshelves in the basement of a used bookstore to try and find a copy. Louis Untermeyer's The Golden Treasury of Poetry and the aforementioned A Children's Book of Verse illustrated by Eric Kinkaid both come to mind. Building a section of poetry in your child's collection, therefore, needs to be driven by the old adage, carpe diem.

But it is not all barriers. Lovers of poetry are among the most enthusiastic of readers and passionate of advocates. Miraculously there are, every year, further collections offered up to the reading public by anthologists and publishers despite the economics. I picture a cabal of anthologists and secretive editors throwing themselves once more into the breach. I am sure they carry before them

A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!

I could go on and on but instead will give the last word to Robert Louis Stevenson. This is the dedicatory poem to his A Child's Garden of Verses:

To Any Reader by Robert Louis Stevenson

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear, he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

Below are a series of recommendations, primarily of anthologies but with some particularly stellar single poet collections as well. We have also included a handful of narrative poems in book form. Enjoy and let us know or any collections you might recommend.

Picture Books

Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Felicia Bond Highly Recommended

Johnny Appleseed by Reeve Lindbergh Highly Recommended

Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and illustrated by Ted Rand and illustrated by Ted Rand Highly Recommended

All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan and illustrated by Mike Wimmer Highly Recommended

The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore and illustrated by Tasha Tudor Highly Recommended

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe and illustrated by Ryan Price Highly Recommended

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and illustrated by Tasha Tudor Highly Recommended

The Ballad of the Pirate Queens by Jane Yolen and illustrated by David Shannon Highly Recommended

Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet Ahlberg and illustrated by Allan Ahlberg Recommended

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc and illustrated by Edward Gorey Recommended

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Stephane Jorisch Recommended

Wynken, Blynken, and illustrated by Nod by Eugene Field and illustrated by Johanna Westerman Recommended

In the Small, Small Pond by Denise Fleming Recommended

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost and illustrated by Susan Jeffers Recommended

Hush! by Minfong Ho and illustrated by Holly Meade Recommended

A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear Recommended

The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear and illustrated by Jan Brett Recommended

Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne and illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard Recommended

When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne and illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard Recommended

The Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Bridget Starr Taylor Recommended

The Tale of Custard the Dragon by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Lynn Munsinger Recommended

My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Archibald Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells Recommended

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Arnold Lobel Recommended

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Marc Tolon Brown Recommended

The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley by James Whitcomb Riley Recommended

Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak Recommended

Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer and illustrated by Christopher H. Bing Recommended

The Edmund Fitzgerald by Kathy-Jo Wargin and illustrated by Gijsbert Van Frankenhuyzen Recommended

Flower Fairies of the Spring by Cicely Mary Barker Suggested

Nonsense Verse by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Lorna Hussey Suggested

Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman and illustrated by Eric Beddows Suggested

This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie and illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen Suggested

Family of Poems by Caroline Kennedy and illustrated by Jon J. Muth Suggested

Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and illustrated by Susan Jeffers Suggested

A Pizza the Size of the Sun by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by James Stevenson Suggested

For Laughing Out Loud by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman Suggested

Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart by Vera B. Williams Suggested

Independent Reader

Poems and Other Writings by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and illustrated by J. D. McClatchy Highly Recommended

Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thompson Highly Recommended

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Recommended

A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein Recommended

Falling Up by Shel Silverstein Recommended

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein Recommended

Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake Suggested

Rhymes and Verses by Walter De LA Mare and illustrated by Elinore Blaisdell Suggested

The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems by Donald Hall Suggested

Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O'Neill and illustrated by John Wallner Suggested

I Saw Esau by Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie and illustrated by Maurice Sendak Suggested

Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Georgina Rossetti Suggested

Young Adult

As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden and illustrated by Edward Mendelson Recommended

Beowulf by Seamus Heaney Recommended

Collected Poems of A. E. Housman by A. E. Housman Recommended

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald and illustrated by Edmund J. Sullivan Recommended

Rudyard Kipling Complete Verse by Rudyard Kipling Recommended

The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson and illustrated by Genevieve Cote Recommended

Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake Suggested

Nine Horses by Billy Collins Suggested

Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins Suggested