The Dark Emperor & Other
Poems of the Night
Written
by Joyce Sidman
Illustrated
by Rick Allen
Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
25
pages
Poetry
You know how you stumble onto something and it is really
better than you thought. Well this book
is one of those. I was at the library, found
this book, and thought it had a cool cover.
I checked it out, but I really didn’t expect much. When I sat down to read it, I fell in love
with the artwork and poems. The author
took the time to write beautiful poems and on the opposite page, she researched
the animal or insect the poem was about and listed wonderful facts about
it. This is a poetry book with a side of
science; you can’t get better than that!
The artwork in this book is unbelievable. The images are relief printing done with
gouache. I know I am supposed to use the
descriptions from our book to describe the illustrations, but to me the
illustrations in this book are works of art on their own. The poems are written on one page with a
small vignette. On the next page there is the artwork, and then the science
facts that refer back to the poem. The
text is black on white pages, and some of the poems are written in a concrete
style of poetry. This is another one for
my library.
This book would be good for third through sixth
grade. The poems are concrete and are
not childish like some poetry picture books, so the older students will enjoy
it more. The interesting facts also make
this a good book for students who think poetry is all love stuff. This book will be good for a Language Arts
lesson on poetry to show the students that not all poetry is about girly
stuff. A science lesson is a must with
this book, with all the wonderful facts about animals and insects. An art lesson would be great using this book
to show the students how relief artwork looks after it is mass printed and how
to use gouache. This book won the
Newberry Medal of Honor in 2011.
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