Hopkins Award Poetry

Coombs Kate. 2012. Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems.  Ill. by Meilo So. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN: 978-0-811-872384-3

Book Review:

In her first book of poetry, Kate Coombs hit the ball out of the park, winning the prestigious Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award in 2013.  And it’s not difficult to see why - her 23 poems wonderfully evoke images from the teeming life found in the ocean. One can almost see the tide “wavy and clear,/saying “Don’t forget me -/I was here/wasss here/wassss here”

Exploring ocean topics such as boats, sand, tide pools, waves, shells, and driftwood, and sea animals such as seagulls, jellyfish, sea urchins, sharks, eels, whales and octopi, Coombs writes a love song to the largest area covering the earth.

Meilo So’s watercolor illustrations bring out the best in these poems, providing visual images to the beautiful descriptions provided by Coombs.  Watery (of course) blues, grays and sand brown colors, as well as meandering images of the topics covered in the poems, allow the reader to envision and experience ocean scenes even in the midst of dry land.

Using various rhyme schemes and some blank verse, Coombs uses her words as a paint brush and playfully brushes words across the page, telling tales of sand, who used to be rock, shopping in tide pools, the prayer of a little fish hiding from a shark, the epic song of driftwood, and the epitaph of a ship wreck: “Here lie the bones/of twenty trees,/lost far from home/under gallons of seas.”

The author grew up near the Pacific Ocean and clearly knows her subject.  With this book of poems she shares her love of the sea with her readers which allows us to view our watery world in a new and interesting way: “For the water sings blue and the sky does, too,/and the sea lets you fly like a gull.”

Sharing the Poetry:

This collection of poems would fit right in as a poetry break in a unit on the ocean, or as an example of a poet’s use of visual imagery in a poetry unit. Readers can feel the sand beneath their toes, hear the cry of the seagulls, see the beautiful, yet deadly, lines of the jellyfish and smell the salt on the air in these poems.  Using Coombs examples, students could try their hand at evoking images from other landscapes.  The world abounds in beautiful imagery just waiting to be explored with words!

Selected Poem:

I loved the personification of Driftwood telling a tale of his adventures in Coombs' poem “Old  Driftwood:

Old Driftwood

Old Driftwood

 has been to sea

   and come back home

     unexpectedly.

          Gnarled sailor,

            now he sits high

              upon the beach

                beyond the tide,

                   telling of mermaids

                     and whales thi-i-is big

                       to all the attentive

                             astonished twigs.

References:

Books in Print. n.d. Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:3959/DetailedView.aspx?hreciid=|32952310|41018420&mc=USA# (accessed April 18, 2014).

Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. n.d. Water Sings Blue: Ocean Poems. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:4529/index.php/jbookdetail/jqbookdetail?page=1&pos=0&isbn=9780811872843 (accessed April 18, 2014).