So Imagine Me: Nature Riddles in Poetry

Lynn Davies offers her young audience 20 nature focused poems that each conclude with readers being asked to identify, based on the clues imbedded in the free verse poetry, what the poem has been describing. If the reader needs additional help in answering the poem’s question, a visual clue is imbedded somewhere in Chrissie Park-MacNeil’s artwork connected to the poem. And, if the reader still can’t come up with a response, an answer key is located on the book’s last page. The key does present one small challenge, however. The answer for the poem reproduced in the “Excerpt” reads: 21: The white-breasted nuthatch is the only bird to move headfirst down trees. The bolded 21 refers to a page, but So Imagine Me: Nature Riddles in Poetry is not paginated which can mean a lot of flipping back and forth in order to match a poem with its answer.

Appropriately, the riddles vary in their levels of difficulty, and, in three instances, poet Davies adds her own visual clue by creating shape poems, with two of the shapes being leaves (but leaves from which trees?) and the third a cloven hoof print (but from what animal?). Davies has also created a poem that she encourages at least three readers to perform in a choral fashion, and she offers directions on how to do that. The poems are equally divided between being presented as a single poem per spread or two per spread.

Park-MacNeil’s art, reproduced as double-page spreads, is full of colour, action and detail. The spreads present a variety of moods with, for example, the opening spread offering the drama of a swooping snowy owl while the closing spread presents a pastoral moonlit nighttime scene. While the presence of humans in nature is represented through the inclusion of man-made structures like a bird feeder, the only living things found in Park-MacNeil’s art are from the plant and animal kingdoms. Though the paintings perfectly complement Davies’ text, they could stand on their own and definitely merit being revisited many times after the initial readings in order for readers to appreciate what they may have been missed when their focus might have simply been on solving the riddle.

In addition to being a fine home or public library purchase, So Imagine Me: Nature Riddles in Poetry would be an excellent school library addition as its contents minimally have a place in language arts, science and art classes.