Once around the Sun (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Once around the Sun
A dozen picturesque poems take audiences month by month, from January through December. The selected characteristics of each month are pretty predictable (January is snow, September is school, October is Halloween), but the free-verse poems offer concrete, kid-accessible images in vivid and attractive phrases (September's "yellow pencils/ in brand-new eraser hats" are "ready to march across miles of lines/ in empty notebooks"), and the poems are quietly linked by their shared opening structures. Pham takes a different tack from her usual sassy ink-and-watercolor vignettes, here creating rich, layered scenes in softly mottled textures and subtle touches of line and pattern in an effect that recalls Ezra Jack Keats in the landscapes, though other elements, such as the faces of the multicultural cast, are more realistic and literally depicted. The gaggle of featured kids provides a point of continuity as they cavort through the seasons and the neighborhood, so that the wordless spreads featuring the gang's adventures operate as part of the narrative. This isn't quite up to the standard of Charlotte F. Otten's January Rides the Wind (BCCB [End Page 504] 1/98), but it's still an evocative tour through a year for those who haven't seen the passage of many.
