Mammalabilia

Florian, Douglas. 2000. Mammalabilia. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-202167-1.

This picture book of mammal poems, illustrated by the author with paintings done on primed brown-paper bags, is a great choice for kids who claim not to like poetry. The poems feature animals from the familiar (bear, fox, giraffe) to the unusual (rhebok, tapir, ibex). They are short (some only two or three lines), heavily rhymed, and often funny.

Some of Florian’s poems are concrete or have concrete elements, like “The Porcupine” and “The Lemurs.” One, “The Zebras,” is a puzzle, along with its accompanying picture – can you see as many zebras in the painting as the poems’ narrators can? In all cases the whimsical pictures are as much of a commentary on the animals as the poems are. In an illustration for “The Mule,” a poem with the last line “Rule of the mule: stay,” the mule in question is literally rooted to the ground, its four legs becoming tree trunks, one with a woodpecker perched and pecking on it.

I can’t imagine this book not being a hit or not lending itself to all kinds of activities. For one thing, the technique of painting on a brown-paper bag is easy to accomplish, meaning that kids can illustrate their own animal poems in the same style as the book. I can imagine grouping the poems into categories with kids – Which poems feature animals talking about their lives? Which poems feature someone else talking about the animal? Would the animal say the same thing about itself that the narrator did, if it were doing the telling? (Maybe the rhebok doesn’t think its “Main/ claim to fame/ is its name”!) I can also imagine integrating this book into lessons about animals, pairing the poem about the animal with facts about its life.

Barbara Chatton, in School Library Journal, calls this book “a zoological garden of delights.”

Chatton, Barbara. School Library Journal. Qtd. in Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0152050248/ref=dp_proddesc_0/103-0423122-5982232?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books