Who Shrank My Grandmother's House?: Poems of Discovery

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

In a prefatory note to this collection of 23 short poems, Barbara
Esbensen explains the book’s subtitle, Poems of Discovery: “[E]very
day, and all around you, there are discoveries to be made. The most
ordinary things can suddenly seem new and unexpected.” Esbensen
sometimes produces this new perception of everyday things by pursuing
the strict logic of an alternative point of view, as when a fictive
child inspects the black-and-white photos of his/her grandfather and
finds in them “a gray child and his big dog / is dark gray Even his
baby sister / is gray Her white curls / bob in the wind and a gray
robin.”

Usually however, the transformation of ordinary things is conveyed
through metaphor. In “Pencils,” for example, pencils are represented
as containing narrow rooms that accommodate elephants, castles, and
watermelons; broken pencils contain unbroken poems, while short pencils
contain long stories. And in a few cases (“Four Poems for Roy G
Biv,” “Sand Dollar,” and “In Autumn”), metaphors help to turn
information that one would categorize as natural science into vivid,
memorable images.

The poems move easily, given the regular use of run-on lines and the
avoidance of basic marks of punctuation such as commas and periods.
Their apparent simplicity is somewhat deceiving, however. The
metaphorical play and shifting perspectives make them mentally
demanding, thought-provoking, and rewarding, both for adults and for the
10- or 11-year-olds to whom the book is primarily directed.

Having admired the work of Eric Beddows in Tim Wynne-Jones’s stories
of Zoom, I was somewhat disappointed by the unevenness of his
illustrations here. At worst, the pictures do nothing more than
illustrate aspects of the poem (e.g., a pen and a piece of paper
accompany “Homework”); at best (and there are more of these by far),
the illustrations elaborate upon the poems’ metaphors in fantastical
ways.

For children at the intermediate level, this collection will bear many
rereadings.