Jack Prelutsky’s The Dragons are Singing Tonight (illustrated by Peter Sís and published by Greenwillow, 1993) is a poetry books about dragon–pet dragons, lazy dragons, mechanical dragons, disconsolate dragons, baby dragons–dragons of all shapes and sizes.  My sister read this book often to her five boys when they were little and they love it to this day.

Using wonderful rythms and imagery, The Dragons are Singing Tonight tells the secrets of a dragon’s life.  What should you do if your dragon gets sick?  The poem My Dragon Wasn’t Feeling Good has the answer:

(First let me say, this photo does not do justice to these illustrations  because they are rich and gorgeous. )

A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams  by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans, 2008).  is a picture book biography of the Imagist poet William Carlos Williams.   Williams is considered one of the great American poets, and the pared down simplicity and strong images of his poems makes them accessible to children.  Their very simplicity also creates a unique intensity and force.

Little Willie Wiliams grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, playing baseball and racing his friends. “But when the other boys went inside, Willie stayed outside.”  He observed everything and listened to the rhythm of the river.

In high school Willie’s teacher read him poetry and he tried to write his own.  But “he had pictures in his mind that didn’t fit exactly into steady rhythms or rhymes.”  “I want to write about ordinary things–plums, wheelbarrows, and weeds, fire engines, children, and trees.”  So he did. 

Willie was a good poet.   But he needed money too.  Willie’s mother suggested  he become a doctor like his Uncle Carlos.  Willie liked the thought of helping people, so off he went to the university to study medicine.  Could he write poetry and study medicine too?

Of course!  And when he returned to his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey to be a family doctor, Willie was busier than ever.   “But not matter how many babies he delivered, no matter now many sick people he cured, Willie could not stop writing poems.”  ”After his long doctor’s day, Willie climbed to the attic” and as the lights in the town turned off one by one Willie tooks words and “shaped them into poems.”

Jen Bryant’s lyrical style  is wonderfully suited to a book about a poet.  She has also written other books about artists:  Georgia O’Keefe, Marianne Moore, composer Olivier Messiaen.

Illustrator Melissa Sweet weaves several of the poems into her artwork and more poems are printed inside the front and back covers.  The dust jacket calls the illustrations “stunning” and that is not too strong of a word for Sweet’s mixed media.

 I adore this book.  I loved studying William Carlos Williams in college, and when I won this book at a writer’s conference, I was surprised by how many of my fellow writers had never even heard of him.  This simple biography provides a fantastic introduction.  It introduces Williams’ life, his poetry, his motivation, his style, and his amazing persistance and work ethic.  It has a timeline, additional biographical information, and a bibliography at the end.  All in just 32 pages!  A River of Words proves once again that picture books aren’t just for children.

If you love the art of Georgia O’Keefe, you’ll love the picture book My Name is Georgia written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter (1998, Harcourt).  I picked this picture book up in Santa Fe when I was visiting the Georgia O’Keefe museum there.  It’s a very simple biography of the artist from her days as a girl to art school in Chicago and then New York:  “At school, I painted my teacher’s ideas.  But when school days were over, I went out into the wide world to discover my own ideas.” 

Georgia paints the Texas sky, the sunset and clouds.  She paints flowers:  “I painted a camellia.  I painted it BIG, so people would notice.  I painted a jack-in-the-pulpit.  I painted it BIG, so people would see.”

Then she goes to the New Mexico desert.  Georgia again finds things to paint:  bones, deserts, mountains, and again the sky.  And in her last painting, she painted the sky.  “I painted my sky BIG, so people would see the sky the way I did.”

Georgia O’Keefe lived to be ninety-eight years old.  To my mind, her art seems particularly accessible to children.  It has a childlike immediacy and boldness of form and color that appeals to them.  So take your kiddo to the art museum then come home and read My Name is Georgia.