Poems from Homeroom

Kathi Appelt

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about this book. I love the second section of it, where Appelt goes into the ideas behind the poems and provides exercises for young readers to get to writing (even if she does make the usual mistake of calling 5-7-5 an established form, rather than a guideline, in English haiku). As for the poems themselves, the jury's still kind of out. Attention is paid to the crafting of them, which in itself makes them rise to above average in today's world of published poetry; if there is a problem, it's that the narrative structure of much of the poetry tends to get away from the image, and so some of it sounds like prose broken up into lines rather than poetry. Appelt is very good at using form, though, and when she does this collection shines.

Overall, there's more good than bad here. Worth checking out.