Book Speak! Poems about books by Laura Purdie Salas illlustrated by Josee Bisaillon

If a tree falls

If a tree falls in the forest
with no ear to hear its fall,
does it make a crackling thunder
or descend in silent sprawl?

If a book remains unopened
and no reader turns its page,
does it still embrace a story
or trap words inside a cage?

This is the third poem in a wonderful new book I spied on a booksellers stall at a recent CBCA conference. Book Speak! Poems about books by Laura Purdie Salas is the perfect book for me. I love poetry, I love books, I regularly share poems with the teachers in my school and I like to collect poems about books and libraries and reading!! This is a scrumptious book with 21 poems about every aspect of books and reading including just what books get up to at night in a bookshop. The illustrations, a mix of collage and line drawings, enhance the poems and might serve as a stimulus for student's art projects too. Here is a web site for the author and from this link you can see more work by the illustrator too.

Here is another favourite poem from this book :

The End

You race
toward me,
checking page numbers
and calculating their distance

You
sprint, skip, skim
to win
the reader’s race
to cross me –

the book’s finish line.

But then
you
smile, cry, sigh,

flip to chapter one
and start again.

I am not so much
The End
as I am an invitation back
to the beginning.

Other lovely poems in this collection include Book Plate, This is the book (might be a song) and Index – all librarians will love this one. We will add this book to our school library next year. You can see a trailer for this book here. I also found an interesting blog about poetry books for children where there is another video about this book.