A Strange Place to Call Home

Gr 4-8–Singer’s poetic celebration of 14 animal species is fascinating, enlightening, and strikingly illustrated. The featured birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, insects, and mollusks have all adapted, over centuries, to life in extreme environments such as ice floes, salt lakes, and pools of oil, where they have found safety from predators and less competition for food. Many of the poems have unique, lilting rhythms; some are written in unusual poetic forms–triolet, cinquain, villanelle, terza rima–others in free verse and varying rhyme schemes. Singer demonstrates her ability to create vivid mental pictures in as few as two to five words. (The dipper–a songbird that eats aquatic insects and fish from clear streams and waterfalls–is “bathtub-toy small”; the limpet–a shelled sea creature’s “…fine construction/employs suction.” Singer has incorporated definitions of unusual words: “simoon,” “hydrothermal vents,” “intertidal zone,” into her poems. Young, master of collage, has created a series of perfectly engineered stylized pieces that accurately portray the poeticized creatures by oh, so carefully piecing together torn and cut paper of varying thicknesses; photo segments showing lots of texture (prickly cacti, dune grasses, fur, wood, clouds, fibrous materials); foil; small basket clippings; pictures from magazines; and much painted paper. Six pages of endnotes include details on each animal species, along with brief information and a Web address that offer further details on poetic forms. This lovely, informative volume will attract poetry and animal lovers and prove useful in the classroom, as well.—Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Public Library, Ohio