Science Curriculum Poetry

Singer, Marilyn. 2012. A Strange Place to Call Home: The World’s Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals that call them Home. Ill. by Ed Young. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN:  978-1-4521-0120-0.

Book Review:

Poet and author Marilyn Singer contributes another volume to her eclectic body of work with an informative book of poems about the environmental adaptation of various organisms in our world. Whether it’s in hot, dusty climes or freezing glacial locales, some unique creatures have learned to live and thrive in spite of the harsh environments in which they find themselves.

 In poetic styles including free verse, haiku, triolet, terza rima, villanelle and other rhyming schemes, Singer informs her readers about Humboldt penguins who live in the “scorching sun” of Chile and Peru, ice worms surviving in glaciers, blind cave fish who live deep in the ocean and have adapted without eyes, and limpets whose “fine construction/employs suction./In other words, its thing/is mightily to cling.” Also addressed are the adaptation of snow monkeys, Spadefoot toads, flamingos, tube worms, mountain goats, camels, mud skippers, petroleum flies who hatch in oil, urban foxes, and a bird called a dipper that has learned to dive, swim and feed underwater: “Gray as wet slate/bathtub-toy small,/the dipper dares/the waterfall.”

Ed Young’s paper collage illustrations add texture and visual imagery to the poems, creating eye-catching details in muted tones which complement the text.

Although there are no page numbers or a table of contents, the author has included two wonderful access features: endnotes with more specific information on each organism/animal in the book and a section about poetry forms which specifies the poetic form used in some of the books’ poems.  Bibliographic sources indicating the author’s research would have given the book more accuracy, however.

Sharing the Poetry:

Combining some of the poems in this book with Steve Jenkins’ How to Clean a Hippopotamus would create an interesting science unit on habitats and adaptation.  Though Jenkin’s non-fiction book deals with symbiosis between animals in the wild, it also addresses how they adapt to their environments to live and thrive.  By adding the graphic, yet humorous book, Exploding Ants: Amazing Facts about How Animals Adapt, by biologist Joanne Settel, a teacher could introduce more strange adaptive animal behaviors and keep students interested in the topic.

Selected Poem:

Although the organism described in “Down in the Depths” (a tube worm) is rather strange, in Singer’s deft hand the poem itself is beautifully descriptive and filled with fascinating facts:

Down in the Depths (tube worms)

Life is hard – it gets intense
          By deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Superheated water rising,

          Sprouting out from tall, surprising

chimneys build on the ocean floor.

Yet there live giant worms galore

          in tubes that shield them from heat.

They don’t have mouths. They cannot eat.

Bacteria that live inside

          these creatures keep them well supplied

                   with necessary nutrients.

Odd partnerships make lots of sense

          around these hydrothermal vents.

References

Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. n.d.  A Strange Place to call Home. http://ezproxy.twu.edu:4529/index.php/jbookdetail/jqbookdetail?page=1&pos=0&isbn=9781452101200  (accessed April 1, 2014).