Keepers: Treasure-Hunt Poems, by John Frank

This slim and pretty volume showed up on our new book cart this morning. It's pretty on the inside, too! John Frank opens the world's junk drawers—the seashore, the attic, the flea market—and presents a poetic ode on each treasure he finds. The verses, written in formal rhyme and meter, are as spare, simple, and lovely as the items he considers.

In "Low Tide", the volume's opening verse, "...shells like broken lockets / Lie scattered on the sandy shore / Where the ocean empties its pockets." An abalone shell is "a melted rainbow cupped in pearl."

I enjoyed "A Trunk of Clothes," in which a child pawing through the attic discovers, initially disdains, and eventually delights in fashions of a bygone era:

Did people actually wear this stuff?
I ask myself as I pull out
a two-tone shoe, a fur-trimmed muff,

a hat that's so old fashioned
you would not be caught dead dressed in it...
but then, I glance behind me,
and...I wonder if...it just might fit.

Each poem is accompanied by a photograph by Ken Robbins. Some of them are sharp and detailed, but others appear to have been blown up too far, then blurred in Photoshop.

Overall, it's a tidy collection, particularly refreshing in its notion that poetry for kids doesn't have to be all wacky, all the time.

Find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at A Year of Reading!