Abigail, Elaine, and The Pheasant on Route Seven: Kaye Starbird's Poems for Children

In the Summer, 1980 ChLA Quarterly, Myra Cohn Livingston rightly lists Kaye Starbird among those writing poetry for children whose work merits consideration.¹ Starbird has published 160 children's poems in five volumes: Speaking of Cows (1960), Don't Ever Cross a Crocodile (1963), A Snail's a Failure Socially (1966), The Pheasant on Route Seven (1968), and The Covered Bridge House, (1979).²

From book to book, the speakers of Starbird's poems grow older. In Speaking of Cows, a little girl talks about being "bad" (p. 42). The child narrator in this book is concerned about Tooth Fairies (pp. 54-55) and has a pretend friend, an Apple Elf (pp. 38-39).

In Don't Ever Cross a Crocodile a somewhat older child likes to ride in an uncle's little blue plane that "looks a lot like a drangonfly" (p. 49). At the end of this book the child reflects that being ten means "I'm now a half of twenty . . . a fifth of fifty." The last four lines convey childlike insight and optimism:

Although an age like ten appearsQuite young and un-adventure-y,My gosh! In only ninety yearsMy age will be a century!

(Crocodile, p. 62)

On a walk in the country in A Snail's a Failure Socially, a slightly older child finds a few artifacts in a cellar hole, all that remains of a house, and wonders about the people who lived there (pp. 36-37). By The Covered Bridge House, the child has advanced to the point of thinking about living independently. The title poem says,

Because there's a raceFor living space,I have a wonderful scheme.I'm planning to own a covered bridgeUp over a running stream.

(Bridge, p. 26)

The rest of the poem details the modifications needed to convert a covered bridge into a cozy house.

The setting of Starbird's poems is an imaginary New England village, Pleasantport, and the surrounding countryside bordering a bay of the Atlantic Ocan. Pleasantport probably bears resemblances to the New England town in which Starbird resides. While a few of the poems incorporate contemporary situations—for example, one reason Miss Casper sold her car was that gas was scarce (Bridge, p. 42)—most seem almost timeless.

Starbird's poems are about all kinds of everyday experiences a child living in such a place might have indoors and out, by himself, with animals, with other children and grown-ups, with relatives. In addition there are a few fanciful poems and some that could be classified as nonsense. Although the poems are presented from a child's viewpoint, the narrator does not always speak in the first person. While sometimes the narrator is definitely a girl or a boy, most often a child of either sex could be speaking.

The book titles lead one to assume that animal poems predominate. This is true only of the first, Speaking of Cows, in which two-thirds of the poems concern animals. With each succeeding book, the number of animal poems decreases and the number of poems about people increases.

Starbird writes about all kinds of animals, pets like dogs, cats, goldfish, and "my first turtle," an orange-shelled turtle with its name, Cook County Fair, painted on its back (Cows, p. 29), and inhabitants of the farmyard and wood like cows, sheep, chickens, a fox, a bear, and a moose "that's loose" (Snail, p. 25). Robins, sparrows, crows, and a multitude of small creatures capture the child narrator's eye: a June bug, an inchworm, a praying mantis, a bumblebee, a mothworm, a trout, a caterpillar, and a hoptoad who, the narrator concludes, "needs a babysitter" (Cows, p. 44).

Many of Starbird's animal poems demonstrate her skillful use of meter and rhyme. The first stanza of "Murray," a poem about a bat, illustrates her typically controlled yet varied rhythm, her ease with rhyme, and her use of alliteration and assonance. All the elements work together to suggest the smooth, expert flight of the bat:

I've noticed at twilightUp...