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  • For Children With Smart Ears
  • Joan Larkin (bio)
Sylvia Plath , The Bed Book, pictures by Emily Arnold McCully, Harper & Row, 1977.
Howard Moss , Tigers and Other Lilies, drawings by Frederick Henry Belli, Atheneum, 1977.

The Bed Book is a large picture book: a poem Plath wrote for her two young children, lavishly illustrated with full-color reproductions of watercolors by Emily Arnold McCully. It is inevitable that much of the interest of this book for the adult who buys it will come from knowledge of Plath's poetry or fascination with the tragedy of her suicide. I opened the book grumpily—looked for and found Ted Hughes' name on the copyright page, as with all the Plath books posthumously published by Harper & Row, and wondered whether the same poem by another writer would have received such an extravagant production.

But despite this cynicism affected at the start, I was charmed by Plath's fantasy of unusual beds: pocket-size beds that grow when watered, spottable beds that are meant to be muddied and stained with paint and jam, traveling tank beds, elephant-back beds, flying beds,

a Bed that mightbe a Submarinenosing through waterclear and green,silver and glitteryas a sardine

or:

if you get hungry [End Page 137] in the middle of the nighta Snack Bed is goodfor the appetite—with a pillow of breadto nibble atand up at the headan Automatwhere you need no shillings,just a finger to stick inthe slot, and out comecakes and cold chicken.

I enjoyed the poem's humor and maternal tenderness—aspects of Plath's work that have been largely ignored. Emily Arnold McCully's watercolors—beautiful, subtly detailed, and warm—are as inventive as the poem, but with some ideas of their own that add to the interest of the book.

My ten-year-old, a highly literate veteran of picture books and a poet herself, tells me she likes best the language of:

Not just a white littletucked-in-tight littlenighty-night littleturn-out-the-light little   bed—   instead . . .

I remember the picture books I read and re-read to her when she was two and older, and knew that had this one been available to us, it would have become a favorite—the sort of book an exhausted, overworked parent wouldn't mind repeating bedtime after bedtime.

Howard Moss's Tigers and Other Lilies is "a zoo of beastly bowers"—a collection of humorous verse inspired by plants with animal names: dogwood, horse chestnut, spiderwort, viper's bugloss, wormwood, skunkbrush. The table of contents alone would make good ear training for smart poem-writing [End Page 138] children—and I hope that the publication of this book means that there are still lots of them. These are sophisticated poems—not for all grownups or children, but for those with smart ears and love of word play. The strong personality and the dry sense of the perversities of the language, or perhaps of nature itself, that come through some of these, make me imagine that it would have been fun to have been read this book by a teasing uncle who used to vex and charm me by pulling coins from my ears.

Some examples:

. . .What makes crab grass a mess?The mess it makes of a terrace,A garden, yard, or lawn,By thrusting in betweenGravel, brick,Stone, or rockUnwelcome claws of green.

. . .An ostrich fern? It's like an ostrich. Sort of.Two legs, though, it doesn't have the support of.

Snapdragon

"That loud-mouthed animal! I can't imagineWhy I'd be named for him," said the snapdragon.

"Those hot, dry scales! That snort! That evilReptilian look! It beats the devil

How such an ugly monster out of mythAnd I could be mentioned in the same breath!"

The dragon, opening his mouth to reply,Nervously twitched his tail, and blinked."I say . . . that's a bit . . . I mean . . . What a lie! . . . "But before he could finish, he became extinct. [End Page 139]

My daughter's delight in these made me regret that I haven't been...

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