Bravura and Skill Yield Kernels of Truth: Norma Farber's Poetry for the Young

Norma Farber has been honored with several awards for the work for which she is chiefly known, poems for adults. But she has also written for a child audience, and the product does not disappoint. The same characteristics that distinguish her adult poems invigorate her poems for the young. There carefully crafted pieces reveal that Farber has the respect for and understanding of the minds of children that result in excellent work.

In his introduction to Farber's first book of poems for adults, The Hatch (Scribner, 1955), John Hall Wheelock, himself a respected poet, remarks that her work

has an energy, a verve, born of a natural vigor of expression. Such bravura has its risks . . . and may mislead the superficial reader. The thrust of staccato cadences, the exuberant vitality of the phrasing, the [bold] use of alliteration . . . these characterize the surface of poems whose kernel yields a subtle knowledge . . . acute observation freshly rendered . . . varying rhyme-schemes, employing assonance, false rhyme and interior rhyme, with great brilliance . . . weave a poetry that has richness to texture and substance . . . originality of expression . . . imaginative vitality.

The vigor, boldness, and meticulous attention to detail of substance and to words which Wheelock speaks of create the unique vision of the book's title poem, one of Farber's finest poems, one of my personal favorites, and one that, though intended for adults, also excites young readers:

I found myself one daycracking the shell of sky,peering into a placebeyond mere universe.

I broke from egg of hereinto anotherwherewider than worldly homeI was emerging from.

I breathed, I took a step,I looked around, and up,and saw another lininginside a further sky.

The poem's imagery and diction subtly distill truth in order to explode the ordinary frame of reference and hint of challenge, adventure, and no outer limits.

Some ten years after The Hatch, Farber began publishing for young readers and listeners. Her children's poems—three collections and a dozen single poem books—have the same unabashed audacity, sharp perception, and technical sureness. Her subject matter is broad, drawn largely from the world of nature, up close and as distant as the horizon and beyond: domestic situations, character studies, the alphabet, a contemplation of aging, relations between generations. She also writes of ancient and classical traditions, such as Noah's flood, Jonah's journey, and an adaptation in verse of a tale from Hawthorne.

Small Wonders (Coward, 1979) and Never Say Ugh to a Bug (Greenwillow, 1979) consist primarily of lyrics, with some deft lighter pieces, nonsense, and a few story poems. These poems lift up inconsequential and often overlooked or derided creatures and objects, some real and some fanciful, with wit and humor, as in "Book Louse":

It's simple truththat one sweet toothand another are apt to differ.So it's hardly fair to be minding,while one is enjoying the poetry, if another's preferring the binding.

Never Say.

She speaks with wonder and admiration in "Sun for Breakfast":

Rise up and lookat pond, at brook.Night is now gone.Morning uponher silver trayis serving day.

Small Wonders.

With unabashed audacity and genial authority she considers maggots, among the most despised of creatures, shows how they fit into the scheme of things, and even gets away with the bland word "nice," as she imparts still another bit of knowledge in "Garbage Collector's Song":

Never say Ugh! to maggots.It's not considered nice.They're nature's things—like coral strings, or grains of glistening rice.

Never Say.

Losers also come out on top in her amusing story poems, among others Where's Gomer? (Dutton, 1974), about Noah's mischievous grandson; in How the Left-Behind Beasts Built Ararat (Walker, 1978), which boldly tackles a troublesome moral issue and also advances a clever explanation for the origin of Ararat, the mountain quite literally created out of a molehill; in How the Hibemators Came to Bethlehem (Walker, 1978), where the vibrant star awakens the unsuspecting, sleeping animals and leads them...