Friday, July 19, 2019

Poetry Friday: Train Thoughts

Carol at Carol's Corner is hosting
this week's round-up of poetic goodness. 
"I Will Love You Well" is Carol's heartfelt poem
about Rooney (the service dog who arrived in her 
life this summer). We look forward to more posts about
Carol's new canine companion. I think Rooney has quite a fan club!


Clackety Track: Poems About Trains (by Skila Brown and illustrated by Jamey Christoph) has done a bit of traveling lately. I checked it out (probably on someone's recommendation), and took it to Jack's house. Then I asked for it back so I could write a Poetry Friday post about it. It sat on my desk while Jack and family were on vacation (and I failed to write the post). Then it traveled back to Jack's house this past week. This morning I sent a text to my daughter asking if they could tuck the book in today's bag bound for our house (along with the two grandsons). We watch the grand boys at our house on Fridays and Grandpa helps out.

Jack loves the rhythmic cadence of these train poems. And while he was on vacation, he had his first ride on a zoo train, making that poem even more interesting. "Shoulder Ballast Cleaner" with its words curving around the vehicle, is a visual delight. And the train facts at the end taught me more about the shoulder ballast, a new term to this Grandma (never too old to learn from a children's book). The succinct four lines of "Electric Train" introduced me to another new word, pantograph, explained in the facts written on train cars at the end of the book. "Bullet Train" found me telling Jack about the bullet train we rode from Paris to the countryside so we could explore the battlefields of World War I.  There's a poem about the subway and one about a sleeper train and so many more to love. 

These final lines of "Freight Train" capture its beauty and allure: "Clankin' crayon pack on wheels. / Racin' rainbow made of steel. / Rows of grooves, cables, and bars. / Graffiti rockin' out the cars. / A badge of rust. A proud oil stain. / There's nothin' plain about a train." If you have a lover of trains in your life, then you should definitely check out this delightful homage to trains.

7 comments:

  1. My granddaughter loves trains and rhymes. This sounds like just the book for her. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. oooooooooh, thanks for the rec! I'm a Skila Brown fan. I didn't know she wrote a children's PB. Fabulous find. Thanks, again!

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  3. Arvie's dad was a Union Pacific engineer so Arvie had so many memories of traveling all over. He would have loved this even as an adult! I had a few with them, special times! Thanks for this, Ramona, new to me. Love "There's nothin' plain about a train."

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  4. My daughter would have loved this book. We went on many adventures involving trains since she was fascinated with them --and still is.

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  5. We are huge train fans around our house. I brought home all the old train books I was weeding from the library for my husband. My grandkids have discovered them and now we have to 'read them' once a week or so. Thanks for the heads up about this book. I'll be looking for it.

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  6. Ramona, the boys must love this book. Trains are always a hit with children. I recently saw a video of Sierra running around a train in a children's area but I have not read any books about trains when I am with her.

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