Looking for Jaguar and Other Rain Forest Poems - Susan Katz

POETRY
Illustrator: Lee Christiansen
Published: 2005
For: Anyone interested in rainforest plants and animals
Rating: very nice, 4
Endpapers: Olivey green





In the Flooded Forest

The river carries us to the sky,
Where a tiny catfish spends its life in a tree.
Neon tetras dart among leaves,
And a sting ray ripples beneath a branch.

We paddle through the treetops
Past a colony of dangling, woven nests.
Orchids grow within our grasp,
And a monkey leans from a nearby limb to spy.

Here we see the forest twice.
Banana blossoms kiss their own reflections
A dolphin leaps past a parrot's perch
As we drift between worlds.

Mmmmm. Nice. Nineteen poems about rainforest animals and plants, some in free verse, some rhyming. I enjoy every one of the free verse poems. The rhyming poems don't leave me feeling quite so satisfied:

Walking Tree

More than anything else, I think I'd like
To watch this palm setting out on a hike.

Its long, skinny trunk isn't planted in ground,
So (unlike other trees) it can walk around.

Instead of legs, it grows roots like stilts,
And it edges along as each of them wilts.

Yet I've stood here peering for half a day,
And even the fronds at the top didn't sway.

I can't see it move though I stare and stare,
But ten years from now, It will be over there.

Fascinating information. But her imagery, alliteration, and cool word choices are so much more evident in her free verse.

The pictures cover the full page and are green, green green. The jaguar peeks out from amongh different leaves, The okapi turns back to look at you so you get a full view of it's interesting and very different stripes, the goliath frog looks.....round and big and froggy.

Time for one more poem. Years ago, when I was teaching fourth grade in Maine, I found a picture and explanation of a huge jungle flower that is supposed to smell like rotten meat or dead carcasses. There was a poem and an illustration in this book reminded me of this (and this rhyming, I'm happy to say, worked for me....):

Rafflesia

World's biggest flower, the giant rafflesia
Isn't a plant that tries hard to please ya.
Inside a vine, it grows from a thread
To be three feet across, a speckled bright red,
And sends out the fragrance of something quite dead,
Which gives it the nickname of stinking corpse lily.
It scatters its four million seeds willy-nilly
Till a pale orange cabbage (a bud in disguise)
Bursts through the vine, grows to basketball size
(To the vast admiration of beetles and flies),
And finally opens up with a hiss.
This is a flower you might want to miss.