A Pizza the Size of the Sun
Poems by Jack Prelutsky
Drawings by James Stevenson
New York: Greenwillow Books
1996
ISBN0-688-13236-7
Ages 9-12
*The Train That Goes Nowhere because we learn in the last line that the wheels are square.
*Rollo, who used to be normal until a steamroller rolled over him, and now he's framed on the living room wall.
*I'm Practically Covered with Needles and Pins because the last line reveals that the person in the poem has swallowed a magnet.
*A Frog, a Stick lists a menagerie of items-- some them downright gross, that end up being stuff in the author's pocket (sounds like a boy).
The poems are all sizes ranging from three lines to several pages. Some of the text even has unusual shapes, such as the never-ending circle poem entitled I Was Walking in a Circle; or the triangle shaped poem in A Triangle Tale. Some of the poems are written backwards as in a mirror-- egamI rorriM ruoY mA I and Backwards Forwards Silly Rhyme.
Prelutsky loves to play with word meanings, taking us one direction with one meaning, and then doing a 180 degree turn in a totally different direction with another meaning of the word(s). Some examples of this style of writing are:
*Oh Mother, I Am Blue Today that makes you think the child is depressed, but instead of the mother comforting him, she simply tells him not to bathe in ink if he didn't want to be blue!
*Please Remove the Seal-- the illustration leads us to see that the seal has to do with a box, but Prelutsky's character confuses the word seal with the animal version.
A common practice Prelutsky uses in his writings is making up unusual names for rhyming purposes, and he's generous with use of aliteration, too:
*Swami Gourami - past predictor who's correct only half the time
*Mister Pfister Gristletwist - preeminent contortionist
*K.C. O'Fleer - famous train engineer
*Gladiola Gloppe of Gloppe's Soup Shoppe
*Quentin Quimble Quamble Quayle - an unrepentant tattletale
*Zeke McPeake - whose voice is a squeak
*Dexter Dixxer's Excellent Elixir
Sometimes the names in Prelutsky's poems give a clue to the kind of person they are or to the direction the poem is heading:
*Miss Misinformation - who can't get anything right
*Rollo - who was rolled over by a steamroller
*Reverso Is Name My - where the lines are reversed
A few times a word gives us no contextual clue to what it is, such as the Preposterpus. And a couple of the poems were a little hard to understand, such as I'm Drifting Through Negative Space, which deals with opposites in part of it, but other parts are confusing. This two page poem uses white font on a gray page, to further support the story.
Stevenson's illustrations black and white drawings dovetail nicely with Prelutsky's poems. They are drawn cartoon-style, and very fitting for this type of humorous poetry.
As for my favorite poems in this book, I'd have to say Spaghetti Seeds, which is a short poem about a man who was conned into planting macaroni that was supposed to grow into spaghetti, and I Do Not Wish to Go to School, where a mother called her daughter's bluff about eating worms. I noticed that it was hard for me to read too many of these at one time because it's like overdosing on silliness, and I eventually tired of so much of the same thing. The poems need to be spread out over a period of time and enjoyed in small batches, and then they would be more appreciated and enjoyed.