How Do You Wrestle a Goldfish?

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English specializing in
children’s literature at St. Jerome’s College, University of
Waterloo.

The 64 poems that make up this collection present a wide range of
children’s experiences. The broad scope is clear from the grouping of
the poems into sections titled “Word Worlds,” “My World,” “The
Bigger World,” and “Other Worlds.” The character of the
experiences and their emotional impact are just as wide-ranging. Some
poems deal with relatively inconsequential subjects such as chewing
pencils, a fantastic carwash, or finding oneself with one foot on the
dock and another in a boat. Others deal with the death of a baby brother
(“One Day Old”), environmental damage (“Remember the Shrike”),
problematic relationships (“How Do You Talk to a Father”), dangerous
forms of play (“Burrowing into Winter,” “Almost Bailing Out”),
and embarrassing moments (“Welcome to Higher Education”). Dawber
regularly uses a first-person narrator and snippets of dialogue so as to
take readers inside children’s experiences. For almost every poem, Pat
Wilkinson highlights the subject matter and its emotional charge with a
black-and-white sketch. Recommended.