Insectlopedia
by Douglas Florian
San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
1998
ISBN 0-15-201306-7
Ages 9-12
Douglas Florian wrote and illustrated this colorful book of twenty-one poems about insects and spiders. The first thing I noticed about the book was the unusual font of the titles, which look almost medieval. Most of the poems are written in standard poetry format, but a few are very unusual. The Inchworm poem is written single-sentenced in the shape of an arched inchworm. The Whirligig Beetles is a single sentence in the shape of the circle, like the bugs turn. The Termites poem is shaped like a termit mound. And smaller, more subtle breaks from the standard lined format include The Army Ants, with its
Left
            Right
Left   
            Right
lines that imitate a marching movement. Another is the lines in The Dragonfly that imitate the movements of a dragonfly:
I sweep
           I swoop
                      I terrorize.

The combinations of the words Florian uses fit his subjects. He uses play on words: She eats eight leaves at least to fill her, which leaves her... He even creates words when needed, such as the remaining of that last sentence ...like a Fatterpillar. The words in The Dragonfly sound ominous-- demon, terrorize, seize, down on your knees. In The Treehoppers, his short two-word lines remind us of bugs hopping. One of my favorites is The Daddy Longlegs, in which the author refers to him as Daddy O and asks him, "Where are your knees?" In some of the poems, he puts one of the words in bold font, such as the word religiously in The Praying Mantis, possibly to help us note the connection with the name of the insect.. In The Weevils, he uses the rhyming word evil to describe them and the damage they do to plants.

The format of the pages are the pictures on one side of the page and the poems facing them. Florian's paintings are whimsical, almost child-like in their simplicity. And surprisingly, there are even bits of collage in each painting-- usually the beginning letters of the bug the poem is about. At first glance, it is easy to dismiss the paintings-- most are not especially pretty to look at, but a closer look reveals that there is more to them-- symbolically and humorously. Take the illustration for The Black Widow Spider. Her web is very cluttered--at first I thought they were musical notes or letters, but the poem gives a hint to what's in the picture, which reveals that all those figures are actually her laundry hanging on her lines (web), and they're all black, not denim, as the poem says. In the illustration for The I O Moth, Florian scatters o's and eyes instead of the letter i's throughout the picture. In The Whirligig Beetles, a wind-up key is attached to one of the beetles as if that is the reason they whirl and twirl.

I enjoyed going past first glance and finding the clues in the words and pictures of Florian's Insectlopedia. It may take some prompting for the children to look beyond first glance, but they'll be rewarded with further revelation in the words and pictures. That was the case with my granddaughter-- some things were obvious-- like the wind-up key on the whirligig beetles, but I also had to point out some other less obvious  things about the illustrations, but once I did, she didn't forget them.
Home
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1