Even more richly patterned than a Kashmir shawl — made by a man, an adornment for a woman — the “Birthday Letters” is a collection of poems into which Ted Hughes has stitched words, phrases and images from Sylvia Plath’s poetry and from the complexity that was their marriage. Hughes’ decision to break his long silence about Plath by creating a poetic counterpoint to Plath’s work and experience makes it easy to draw two possible conclusions about the book. One is that Hughes’ new work is, simply, a valentine to his dead wife, who, swamped by “the unthinkable old despair and the new agony” (“Visit”), ended her own life 35 years ago this month. The second conclusion, crass and ultimately ludicrous but the one likely to be drawn by the people who have for three decades called him a murderer, is that Hughes has finally “silenced” Sylvia Plath by folding her words into his own. Yet “Birthday Letters” has a far more profound purpose than either of those offered by a clean side/messy side polarity, which Hughes makes clear on the book’s dedication page. The poems in “Birthday Letters” are for Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, the two children Plath left behind.

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Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us …
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face.
(“Life After Death”)

Hughes’ careful control of Plath’s literary estate has become legendary among the Plath cultifiers. He is notorious for refusing interviews, charged with self-serving edits of unflattering material and even for deleting poems critical of him from Plath’s published work. Biographers, Plath scholars and feminists — perhaps the most vicious Hughes vilifiers of them all — have ascribed to him the basest of motivations while maintaining their own stainless purposes: “It’s not that I’m trying to push myself forward or trying to climb to fame on the back of the poor dead girl,” claimed one memoirist who had been Plath’s neighbor for a single year. Another biographer, Paul Alexander, offered this despicable rationale for his “sensitive” portrait of Plath’s life: “The particular ways one person is cruel to another are always interesting to no end.” Few of these people have bothered themselves to acknowledge the quite pointed statements Hughes made that revealed in no uncertain terms his primary concern: his children, and his responsibility to shield them from information that they deserved to be shielded from, whatever the cost to his own reputation and comfort.

Common knowledge to anyone familiar with Plath and Hughes is that they had separated painfully just months before Plath’s death on Feb. 11, 1963; there was another woman involved. When their mother died, Nicholas Hughes had just passed his first birthday; Frieda was not quite 3. Plath’s suicide note was found pinned to their perambulator. In addition to the sickening ricochet of emotions anyone in his position would have felt, Hughes was left in a seemingly untenable predicament: He would have to serve masters with dramatically opposing needs — Plath’s literary estate, his vulnerable children and, as he put it years later in a letter to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson, “my simple wish to recapture for myself, if I can, the privacy of my own feelings and conclusions about Sylvia, and to remove them from contamination by anybody else’s.” Somehow it was decided among the Plath deifiers that Hughes had forfeited his right to privacy from the moment his marriage to Plath crumbled; about his children they concerned themselves not at all.

If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox –

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
(“Epiphany”)

Among Plath’s papers at the time of her death were a variety of unpublished manuscripts, including the poems that became “Ariel” — the electrifying work that eventually placed Plath firmly in the canon of 20th century poetry. They were produced in a literal fever of creativity during the last six months of her life; several of these poems were scorching accusations of betrayal directed at Hughes. In addition, there were Plath’s journals: guidebooks to her imagination, but also filled with sometimes heedlessly vituperative commentary on friends and relatives. There was also the matter of American publication of “The Bell Jar,” which had only been published in England — pseudonymously, to protect her mother and other fictionalized models from the condemnations found within the thinly disguised autobiography of the novel.

Hughes’ decisions regarding the controlled publication of Plath’s work are stripped of mystery — despite the fantasies of the rabid Plathophiles who have dogged him for 35 years — when put in the context of his children’s lives and ages. “Ariel” appeared, minus “some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962,” Hughes freely admitted, in 1965, just two years after Plath’s death; all of the “Ariel” poems appear in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Collected Poems,” published in 1981, when Frieda and Nicholas were young adults. The American edition of “The Bell Jar” appeared, bearing Plath’s name and after consultation with Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, in 1971.

“The Journals of Sylvia Plath” were published in 1982. In his foreword, Hughes wrote that, in addition to the journals housed in the Neilson Library at Smith College, there had been two additional notebooks “continuing the record from late ’59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared.” Plath scholars were enraged — the destroyed notebook presumably contained journal entries from the “Ariel” period, perhaps key to the understanding of Plath’s greatest poems. Feminists were triumphant — Hughes had, they were convinced, admitted to destroying the most succulent evidence of his cruelty to Plath, and in so doing had justified their hatred. Biographers were, of course, simply frustrated. No one gave Hughes any credit for putting his children’s needs first. Nor did they seem to understand that by admitting to the destruction of the journal Hughes showed himself to be an honorable man; he could have easily destroyed the journals and never admitted to their existence — who would have been the wiser?

In 1971, a decade before the publication of “The Journals,” Hughes wrote a letter to literary critic A. Alvarez, making explicit his reasons for suppressing private information about Plath, especially regarding her suicide. Alvarez had published a memoir of his friendship with Plath, “the first account to give details of Plath’s death,” according to Janet Malcolm, one of the more candidly parasitic of Hughes pursuers and the author of “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.” Hughes’ reaction, as published in Malcolm’s book, was fierce:

“For your readers, it’s five interesting minutes, but for us it is permanent dynamite … for F. and N. [Frieda and Nicholas, then 11 and 9], she is the absolute centerpin — they have made her very important, the more so because of her obvious absence. Throughout the mess I’ve been making of replacing her these last years, their image of her — of what she did and was — is going to decide their lives … Before your details, it was vague, it was a mystery. But now you have defined the whole thing, and handed it to the public. In a real way, you have robbed them of her death, of any natural way of dealing with her death. This will add up through every year they live.”

It’s not necessary to argue that children, especially children made more vulnerable by the loss of a parent, need to be sheltered from information too frightening for them to process. So why is it that Hughes’ unbudging concern for his children — his refusal to put anyone or anything before them — has been so ignored, or worse, misrepresented?

The answer is simple and ugly, as Hughes reveals in “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother,” one of the two poems in “Birthday Letters” not addressed to Plath. The factions of Plath cultists (the demanding literary keepers-of-the-flame who “Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit/Over their symposia”; the “libbers,” as Ted’s sister Olwyn Hughes calls them, who “Bite the face off her gravestone”; and the prurient ersatz biographers, who “Pulling her remains, with their lips/Lifted like dog’s lips/Into new positions”) have appropriated Sylvia Plath, and consideration for her survivors, no matter how young, was and is inconvenient. They do not care.

But Hughes cares, and the poems in “Birthday Letters” spill out his love and compassion and grief — for his children, for his haunted wife and her “huge/Mortgage of hope,” for his lost young self, for the time when “Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck,” and for the time when their luck ran dry. They are poems vivid with tenderness and sincerity, appreciation, incredulity, humility and courage, and like tea left steeping too long, tannic with sorrow. Here are the truths that his children needed to grow into, the truths that, revealed too soon, may have flooded their fragile boat as it was carried out on the riptide of their mother’s death.
I woke up on the empty stage with the props,
The paltry painted masks. And the script
Ripped up and scattered, its code scrambled,
Like the blades and slivers
Of a shattered mirror.
(“The Table”)

Frieda and Nicholas Hughes are now deep in their 30s. For much of their lives, they have been robbed of much more than their chance to deal with their mother’s death. But Hughes’ patient integrity, his refusal to allow his family to be defined by the lurid story concocted by “peanut-crunchers,” has finally been rewarded. For years he stood tall in the ancient doorway of his house, banging on pots and pans, while the dogs kept coming back, dragging away the bones of his family’s life, stealing every story, assuming ownership of each detail: the St. Botolph’s party where the two poets met, the rainy Bloomsday wedding, the furiously broken table, the yard filled with daffodils, the red corduroy curtains. What the dogs didn’t know is that all the time they were sniffing around the house, the father of Frieda and Nicholas was stealing the stories back, keeping them safely hidden, and now they belong, as they should, to his children.

The poems collected in “Birthday Letters,” written privately over many years and perhaps without an understanding of what he could or would do with them eventually, were, in their writing, an act of parenthood like any other: Trusting in time, you remain the safe harbor, shielding and teaching and suggesting and gently steering, saving some information for more appropriate moments, hoping that at least a majority of the choices you’ve made have been the right ones, and eventually your children glide past you, armed with your accreted guidance, to live the lives of their own making. “My father saw it as his mission to protect his children from all that,” said Frieda Hughes in a unique 1997 interview, referring to the public’s obsessive interest in the private details of her mother’s life. Appearing with the interview was a poem by Frieda Hughes — now an internationally known painter and children’s book author — in which she searingly focuses her anger on the people who appropriated her mother, the ones who “fingered through her mental underwear.” Her poem ends “They called her theirs./All this time I had thought/She belonged to me most.”

His children had lost their mother. With the poems in “Birthday Letters,” Hughes took the black shroud of their mourning and adorned it, as you would cover a shawl with vines and petals, as you would take flowers to a cemetery, as he and his children once “arranged/Sea-shells and big veined pebbles/Carried from Appledore/As if we were herself” on a grave — giving back to them their brilliant, flawed young parents, their father’s love for their absent mother, their mother’s fruitfulness and her ferocity, the awful pain and the joy that made them. Now, when they are ready, he has given their story to his son and daughter. Sylvia’s children are nothing but lucky to have such a father.

A fragile cutting, tamped into earth,
You took root, you flourished only
In becoming fruitful — in getting pregnant,
In the oceanic submissions
Of giving birth. That was the you
You loved and wanted to live with.
The kernel of the shells — each prettily painted –
Of the doll from the Russian corridor,
The inmost, smiling, solid one …
I was there, I saw it.
(“Remission”)

I was waking

Sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements.
Was it then I bought a peach? That’s as I remember.
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.

At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh

By my ignorance of the simplest things.

This stunningly fresh and original poem, written in a diarylike style, gives way to poem after poem about the young couple — their first meeting and falling love, their life together as students, as young poets, as newlyweds, as burgeoning literary figures in America (Plath was from Massachusetts, where they lived briefly in the Amherst area), as struggling husband and wife, as parents. Hughes tells the whole story of their love and its harrowing aftermath from the inside in a book of 88 poems as beautiful, fierce and vivid as any to have appeared on either side of the Atlantic since Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies” rocked the world of letters in 1959. A major new book of poems by an unquestionably major poet is always good news, but it is rarely “real” news — the stuff of newspaper columns. Nevertheless, “Birthday Letters” has made waves on both sides of the Atlantic. On Jan. 19, the New York Times published a Page 1 story about the book. The New Yorker ran full-page photographs of Hughes and Plath in their heyday. In England, the book was the subject of headlines and lead editorials (including one in the Times). When was the last time a volume of poetry attracted so much attention?

The reasons for the attention are, of course, extra-literary. When Plath committed suicide in her little flat in London on a cold February morning in 1963, with her children nearby, the legend was born. There would, indeed, have been no legend without the poems that Plath wrote about her decline into mental illness: poems collected in “Ariel.” This posthumous volume was followed by “The Bell Jar,” a searing autobiographical novel. It was widely assumed that Hughes was a demon who drove his young wife to suicide by ignoring her, then running off with another woman, Assia Wevill — who bizarrely committed suicide in exactly the same way five years later. The Plath-Hughes story fed the imagination of biographers and would-be biographers. The feminist movement also co-opted the story, turning Plath into a victim, Hughes into a monster. I can recall a reading that Hughes gave at Oxford University some years ago where women held up placards in the hall that denounced him as a misogynist and wife-killer. The ins and outs of the Plath story reached a kind of crescendo a few years ago when Anne Stevenson, an American poet who knew Plath and has lived in England for several decades, published (with the cooperation of Hughes) a biography of Plath called “Bitter Fame.” Stevenson’s admirable book was judicial, and fair to both Plath and Hughes, giving the poetry center stage. But Janet Malcolm (in the New Yorker) and others attacked Stevenson mercilessly as a pawn of the Hughes camp.

For 35 years, Ted Hughes has kept his own counsel, refusing to talk to journalists or scholars or biographers (he did speak to Stevenson, but revealed little). This silence on his part was considered arrogant by some, noble by others. It was certainly taken by many as a sign that he did not care what people thought. Now, with the publication of “Birthday Letters,” we see that indeed he did care, a great deal. He has been quietly, secretly, writing these poems since her death. He has shaped the story into a coherent, brilliant, evocative sequence of poems — his best work since “Crow,” that gnarled, difficult volume that took the poetry world by storm in the ’70s.

Hughes made his mark early, publishing “The Hawk in the Rain” in 1957. That volume was selected for publication in a contest judged by W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore. The poems were marked by a raw, almost feral, intelligence and a powerful alliterative style that harked back to the Anglo-Saxon poets. Hughes wrote famously about animals: hawks, otters, foxes, horses. He was, after all, a Yorkshireman, a country boy; he knew a lot about the animal kingdom and the workings of nature, as was obvious from this work. But the animals in his poems were more than animals; they were embodiments of the spirit. They become creatures in a complex mythmaking.

Plath stunned Hughes with her intelligence and beauty, her freshness, her bite. She was, he writes, “a new world. My new world” — made all the more appealing by her Americanness, by her poetic sensibility. “I saw my world again through your eyes,” he writes to her in “The Owl.” Through her eyes, the world became “foreign./Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens./A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.” From the beginning of their marriage, it was obvious to him that she had access to another, terrifying level of consciousness: “You were never/More than a step from Paradise,” he writes in “Child’s Park.” “You had instant access, your analyst told you,/To the core of your Inferno –/The pit of the hairy flower.”

Hughes evokes the academic world of Cambridge with the ring of perfect recollection. Exactly how he viewed Plath is seen, for instance, in “St. Botolph’s,” where he writes of their initial meeting:

First sight. First snapshot isolated

Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller

Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs

Simply went on up. That flaring hand,

Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.
And the face — a tight ball of joy.

In subsequent poems, Hughes traces the heady pilgrimage of himself and Plath from Cambridge to Spain (on their honeymoon) to America to Devon. Landscapes become dreamscapes. In America, where several fine poems are set, the Grand Canyon is evoked with peculiar resonance, pictured as “America’s Delphi,” a place where Sylvia “wanted a sign.” Similarly, the Badlands are summoned eerily as a “landscape/Staked out in the sun and left to die.” Hughes’ own visionary poetry is concentrated here, focused by all the light of his strong imagination to a white-hot point of fire.

My guess is that readers who do not normally find poetry a genre that attracts them will find something worthwhile in “Birthday Letters.” The dense thickets of language and oblique myth and metaphor that have marked this poet’s earlier work give way, in this volume, to poetry of unusual — even breezy — readability. The poems are all relatively short — few of them extend to more than three pages — and each one is constructed as a further installment in an overarching story, which has something of the narrative feel of fiction. Readers who know nothing about Plath and Hughes will still find it compelling, but those familiar with the story and with Plath’s poems will find extraordinary riches here. (Hughes covertly and overtly refers to many of Plath’s poems here, sometimes — as in “The Rabbit Catcher” — offering his own version of an anecdote already written about by Plath.)

The poems about their courtship comprise my favorite part of the
collection. And these include a vivid poem about indefidelity, aptly
named “Fidelity”:

She and I slept in each other’s arms.

Naked and easy as lovers, a month of nights. Yet never once made love. A holy law

Had invented itself, somehow, for me.

But she too served it, like a priestess, Tender, kind and stark naked beside me.

The self-justifications for this act of infidelity are the stuff of
ordinary irrationality: “A holy law/had invented itself, somehow, for
me.” Somehow, Hughes’ self-consciousness about this infidelity only makes
the affair with Plath all the more vexed and poignant.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Several of the finer poems center on Plath’s obsessive relationship with her powerful father, Otto, who died when she was 8. In “The Shot,” Hughes writes: “Your Daddy had been aiming you at God/When his death touched the trigger.” Otto is called “The god with the smoking gun.” “The Minotaur,” another high point in the sequence, pinpoints the problem. It tells of a rage that Plath flew into when Hughes came home “Twenty minutes late for baby-minding” and found her smashing a mahogany tabletop that had been his mother’s “heirloom sideboard –/Mapped with the scars of my whole life.” Hughes cried: “Go on,/Smash it into kindling./That’s the stuff you’re keeping out of your poems!”

This is amazing stuff. Hughes portrays himself as his wife’s poetic mentor here; but he also pictures himself as the one who begins to unravel the skein that led to Plath’s undoing:

The bloody end of the skein

That unravelled your marriage,

Left your children echoing

Like tunnels in a labyrinth,

Left your mother a dead-end,

Brought you to the horned, bellowing

Grave of your risen father –

And your own corpse in it.

Otto becomes the Minotaur lying at the base of the labyrinth, ready to devour his daughter. And he does.

Another astounding poem is “The Table,” which opens: “I wanted to make you a solid writing-table/That would last a lifetime.” Hughes explains how he fashioned this table from a “broad elm plank two inches thick/The wild bark surfing along one edge of it/Rough-cut for coffin timber.” Plath was delighted, even euphoric, as she sat there with her cup of Nescafé each morning, settling down to write. But always, it was Daddy who hovered, who beckoned from the nether world as his daughter wrote. “It did not take you long/To divine in the elm, following your pen,/The words that would open it,” writes Hughes. “Incredulous/I saw rise through it, in broad daylight,/Your Daddy resurrected,/Blue-eyed, that German cuckoo/Still calling the hour/Impersonating your whole memory.”

Hughes gets inside of Plath’s hauntings as only he could, discerning “the terror’s goblins” in “Apprehensions,” those fears that would surface and eventually confiscate everything that the young poet held dear: “Your wedding presents, your dreams, your husband.” Plath’s downward spiral into madness is traced meticulously, eerily, as in “The Bee God,” where Daddy once again emerges to plague his bedeviled daughter. We also learn from many of these poems, as in “Being Christlike,” that Plath did not relish the role of martyr:

You did not want to be Christlike. Though your father

Was your God and there was no other, you did not

Want to be Christlike.

Plath is ensnared by madness, wrestling with demons every day as she struggles to write. In “The Beach,” another stunning poem, she is compared to “a migrant eel in November,” someone who “lashed for release” and “needed the sea.” The poem recounts one of many breakdowns that made life with Plath unbearable in the end for Hughes, who, despite his love, found himself helpless in the face of her misery.

The sequence culminates in a poem called, ironically, “Fairy Tale,” a terrifying tour de force. “You went off, a flare of hair and a plunge/Into the abyss,” writes Hughes. In a dazzling finale, which includes such terror-suffused poems as “Night-Ride on Ariel,” “Telos” and “The Ventriloquist,” Hughes summons the specter of Death repeatedly, facing it down, evading it, coddling it, scorning it. One has not seen such ferocity in the face of extinction since Plath herself wrote the great death poems of “Ariel.” Hughes is, undoubtedly, siphoning off some of Plath’s creative fluids here. His tone, the kinds of imagery he evokes, even the diction, will seem familiar to readers of Plath. This was, perhaps, inevitable. But it seems justified in these circumstances. Hughes was there, and he shared the terror of her last years as she teetered on the edge of oblivion. His tenderness for her — most explicit in “Robbing Myself,” a gorgeous elegy — is evident on every page. One begins to understand, for the first time, the nature of their love, and its tragic dimensions.

When the news value of “Birthday Letters” has run its course, and the volume takes its place on the library shelf, grateful readers will return, will linger in its pages. Poetry cannot be understood in one fell swoop, and this seems especially true of this complex, moving and unbearably painful sequence. It will take years to assimilate it properly. In the meanwhile, Ted Hughes has given us a huge gift here, one that has cost him dearly. We should rejoice.

While poetry and medicine might seem unrelated, for Waring they have been intertwined since childhood, when she accompanied her grandfather, a country doctor in Virginia, on house calls. “He used to recite Shakespeare and the romantic poets when I was small, so I grew up influenced by both medicine and art,” Waring said recently in a phone interview from her Washington, D.C., home. Indeed, her first foray into writing was to record her grandfather’s stories about doctoring.

Many of Waring’s poems glow with the rage of someone stuck within a health-care system that doesn’t always have a patient’s best interest in mind. “The ones [doctors] who were sensitive and easy to work with don’t make for such dramatic stories as the ones who were kind of cruel,” Waring says. As a labor and delivery nurse, Waring often found that low-income women were treated poorly. “They were surgerized unnecessarily, not given adequate anesthesia or weren’t spoken to with respect,” she says.

Waring’s work vibrates with the intuition of someone who has witnessed hundreds of births, some brutal and some beautiful. “Everything that is inside of you, from your ancestors forward, comes to bear on your childbirth experience,” Waring said. “It’s very mysterious and I don’t understand it.”

Dark Blonde
Poems by Belle Waring
Sarabande Books
75 pages

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IT WAS MY FIRST NURSING JOB

and I was stupid in it. I thought a doctor would not be unkind.
One wouldn’t wait for a laboring woman to dilate to ten cm.

He’d brace one hand up his patient’s vagina,
clamp the other on her pregnant belly, and force the fetus

through an eight-centimeter cervix.
She tore, of course. Bled.

Stellate lacerations extend from the cervix
like an asterisk. The staff nurses stormed and hissed

but the head nurse shrugged, He doesn’t like to wait around.
No other doctor witnessed what he did. The man was an elder

in his church. He chattered and smiled broadly as he worked.
He wore the biggest gloves we could stock.

It was my first real job and I was scared in it.
One night a patient of his was admitted

bleeding. The charge nurse said, He won’t rip her.
You take this one.

So I took her.
She quickly delivered a dead baby boy.

Not long dead — you could tell by the skin, intact.
But long enough.

When I wrapped him in a blanket, the doctor flipped open the cover to let the mother view the body, according to custom.

The baby lay beside her.
He lay stretched out and still.

What a pity, the doctor said.
He seized the baby’s penis between his own forefinger and thumb.

It was the first time I had ever seen a male not circumcised
and I was taken aback by the beauty of it.

Look, said the doctor, A little boy. Just what we wanted.
His hand, huge on the child, held the penis as if he’d found

a lovecharm hidden in his grandmother’s linen.
And then he dropped it.

The mother didn’t make a sound.
When the doctor left, she said to me in a far flat voice

I called and told him I was bleeding bad.
He told me not to worry.

I don’t remember what I said. Just that
when I escorted her husband from the lobby

the doctor had already gone home. The new father followed me
with a joyful strut. I thought Sweet Jesus Christ

–Did the doctor speak to you?
— No ma’am, the father said.

I said as quick-as-I-could-so-I-wouldn’t-have-to-think–
The baby didn’t make it.

The man doubled over. I told him all wrong.
I would do it all over again.

Say–
Please, sir. Sit down. I’m so very sorry to tell you–

No. It’s been sixteen years.
I would say, I am your witness.

No. I have never told the whole truth.
Forgive me.

It was my first job
and I was lost in it.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

SHOTS

Three nurses to hold him, this four-year-old who kicks me
crazy in the belly — six months pregnant but ha!
I’ve got the needle — the Measles-Mumps-Rubella.
Child, it stings like hell.

Listen to me, my little immunized enemy —
I’ll take a bruise from you
before I’ll see another kid like this one carried through the clinic doors
at the end of shift in his father’s arms, seizing
seizing
The father’s shirt is
black with sweat
is praying in Mexican

grand mal, I try to get a line in, Mother of God, intractable
Get him over to St. Luke’s

but in the ambulance, he codes, and then, in the ER
with the furious swirl of personnel, crash cart rumbling up, curtains
snatched to shield him from the drive-bys and the drunks,
the boy expired.
Measles encephalitis.
He never got his shots.

So walk out, dark blonde, into the sun that will scald you red
and bleach your hair to tungsten burning, drive the dusty valley
smacked with
irrigated fields. Bad counterfeit. Too green.

His young bones green, unripe, gronjo
from the old Teutonic root —

Green. Untrained. Green. Freshly killed.
His young bones green and full of marrow.

Green at work there in rows, hands stretched out to pick a
beefsteak tomato at the end of season when they strip the plants clean
whether the fruit is ripe or not.

More power to them, say I, and so will your 4-year-old. Rhyme and meter
are godsends for anyone learning to speak, read, sing or joke. They
transform the random sounds we rely on for communication into inevitable
music. They help us remember the lengths of months, the order of the
letters and the worst names to call our siblings. They probably make us
smarter, like listening to Mozart. And they’re particularly effective at
leashing emotions and plots that threaten to break out of control. The only
catch is, they have to be handled with skill.

“Stomp, Stomp! A Dino Romp,” by Bob Kolar, shows the new wave of verse at its
best. Intended for very small people, the text is brief, with at most four
words per spread. Many of those words are onomatopoeias. “STOMP, STOMP!
Hee, hee. THUMP. WHUMP! Look at me!” begins the tale, as the young dinosaur
hero leaves home, kicking over lamps, slamming the door and giggling at
its handiwork. As the dino rampages across the savanna, scattering
animals, it’s the biggest thing in sight. It dwarfs the hippo; even the
lion runs. Then — “Stompity?” — a shadow falls. Big Dino has arrived to claim
its straying offspring. Kolar perfectly captures one of toddlerhood’s joys:
youthful passion comfortingly contained by adult authority, all in 36
rhyming words that don’t miss a beat.

Nothing could be less fussy than this simple, exuberant book, yet a close
look shows Kolar’s exacting attention to detail. With so few words to work
with, he makes every punctuation mark count. His sweet, visually effective
watercolor technique could have been chosen for its symbolism. He draws his
characters and scenery with fine outlines and colors precisely inside the
lines. But by wetting the paper he lets the paint bleed out, creating
energetic haloes around the characters that shade them and give them depth.
It’s a perfect technique for illustrating a story about the boundaries
between the emotional self and the outside world.

Like “Stomp, Stomp!,” Linnea Riley’s “Mouse Mess” uses formalism — collage
illustrations, a verse text — to control its central anarchy. The murine
protagonist waits until the family whose house he shares has gone to bed,
then raids their kitchen, with results that will be familiar to anyone who
has lived with small creatures. The 4- to 7-year-olds who make up the
book’s target audience may not notice how carefully composed this chaos is,
but the crumb-sweepers and spill-wipers reading it to them will. Riley cuts
her olives, apple cores, forks, corn flakes, mice, milk jugs, water and so
on out of paper that she has painted with sponges. The technique keeps
edges sharply defined and shadow free. The dripping, toppling still lifes
that result are oddly static.

Linnea’s text is similarly simple and graphic: “Sniff-sniff, milk and
cheese. Mouse would like a taste of these,” goes a typical spread. For the
most part, she sticks to trochaic tetrameter — lines made up of four
two-syllable feet, with the stress on the first syllable of each foot. It’s
the quintessential childhood meter, the rhythm of jump-rope songs and
witches’ incantations (e.g., “Engine, engine, number nine,” or “Double,
double, toil and trouble”). When Linnea varies the beat, she does so in
ways that don’t confuse people trying to read out loud: It makes no trouble
for the reader that “Sniff-sniff” is a spondee, or double-stressed foot,
and omits the two unstressed syllables called for in the meter. Linnea may leave out the
occasional unstressed syllable, but she never makes a rhyme depend on one,
and she never forces you to rush over words that cry out for stress. It’s a
relief to find such lovely order in a messy kitchen.

Dan Yaccarino’s “Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I’m off to the Moon!” varies its rhythms
quite a bit more than “Mouse Mess.” But then, the story — a little boy’s
straightforward fantasy trip to the moon and back — has much less emotional
chaos to contain. Yaccarino’s paintings evoke the thrusting rockets,
unearthly angles and sudden changes in acceleration that make being thrown
in the air such a hoot to the book’s 2-to-6-year-old intended audience.
The hero looks like a stylized Tintin, his blond, cowlick-topped head as
round as the fishbowl helmet of his space suit. Each page yields a punchy
epigram, like “There’s outer space all over the place,” or “Moon rocks in a
box.” Occasional imperfect rhymes, such as the one in the title, may
irritate purists. Still, you’ve got to love a book with the line “See you
later, lunar crater.”

Of course, most 6-year-olds and their readaloudtoers don’t know from
tetrameter, spondees and so on, so you might think they wouldn’t be irked
by the misuse of such things. Poetry, however, resembles a certain hirsute
young person in that when it’s good, it’s well worth the admission price,
but when it’s bad it’s awful. Even if your child doesn’t find the bad stuff irksome, you sure will on the 20th reading. And
there’s a whole diaperload of the bad stuff out there.

Take Bill Maynard’s “Incredible Ned.” (Please!) The protagonist, poor thing,
has the soul of an artist, which manifests itself by making every noun he
pronounces appear over his head, to the amazement of his friends and the
annoyance of his teachers. (At least, that’s what the text tells us; for
some reason Frank Remkiewicz’s pictures show the objects beside Ned, behind
him, around him — everywhere but over his head.) Maynard unfolds Ned’s story
in anapestic tetrameter — that’s the ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM,
ba-da-DUM rhythm for which Dr. Seuss is so justly renowned. To make
Maynard’s book work, though, you kind of have to cram some things in and
stretch some things out. For example, try reading aloud the sentence “No
wonder the children didn’t get their books read.” You said, “No WONder the
CHILdren DIDn’t get their BOOKS read,” right? To fit Maynard’s scheme, you
should have mumbled, “No WONder the CHILdren dint GET their books READ,”
swallowing an entire syllable in “didn’t” and shoving a powerful, important
noun — “books” — furtively under your breath. The whole book is like that.

Of course, cramming some things in and stretching some things out plays an
honorable part in the history of American anapestic tetrameter. “Listen,
my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”
even begins with a dactyl (DUM-da-da) and sticks in a run of iambs (ba-DUM) for the galloping reader to clatter over
in haste. But Longfellow knew what he was doing, and it works. Furthermore,
Maynard stoops to the most obvious rhymes: “giraffe” and “laugh,” “school” and “fool.” For every
Kolar or Riley, there are dozens of limping Maynards, so read aloud before
you buy.

(The little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead,
by the way, is not the denizen of some anonymous nursery rhyme, as pretty
much everyone thinks. She’s a braindaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
See — even you know one of his poems by heart. Wouldn’t Great Grandpa be
proud?)