A Poetry Friday Guest: Barney Saltzberg!

Ooooh! I have a guest! And not just any guest, but Barney Saltzberg - a singing, songwriting, illustrating, picture book and poetry writing guest. The piece of a poem that follows is an excerpt from his book All Around the Seasons, coming out next week. Can anyone guess how many poems/seasons are in the book? Good - all of you who said four can stay late and help clean the erasers.


WINTER
by
Barney Saltzberg

A carrot nosed friend
Appears in the yard;
Forever smiling
A snowman stands guard.

Flickering candles,
Reindeer and sleighs,
Twinkling lights-
Hooray, holidays!

Gliding on ice,
Bundled in fleece.
Silently snow falls;
Winter is peace.

(© 2010 by Barney Saltzberg)

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If you've ever had the luck to see Barney Saltzberg perform or use one of his books as a read-aloud, I'd be willing to bet you've heard kids' laughter. Heck, in my library, kids started laughing when I showed them the title The Soccer Mom from Out of Space (then kept laughing all the way through).

All Around the Seasons (from Candlewick) is for the younger crowd and as the piece of Winter up above shows, it's not just about the laughs. Seasons is instead about that warm, happy, fun reading-in-the-lap time feeling, seems to me. And that is something we can always use.

Thanks for stopping by (both you and Barney)... and if you haven't already, why not head on over to the Poetry Friday roundup, happily hosted over at Great Kid Books? You'll get Langston Hughes and book reviews and poems and more, more, more.