Zoomerang a Boomerang: Poems to Make Your Belly Laugh

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

This children’s picture book distributes its 18 poems over 32 spacious
pages. Martchenko’s energetic, colorful, effusive illustrations figure
prominently on every page but never overwhelm the texts. Several of the
rhymes are traditional: “Polly Had a Dolly,” “Head and
Shoulders,” “What Do You Suppose,” “Kookaburra,” “What They
Said,” and “Iroquois Lullaby” (as this list illustrates, the book
also includes song lyrics). Canadian writers are well represented by
Dennis Lee (“Skyscraper”), bp Nichol (“Everywhere”), Sheree
Fitch (“Garbage Day”), sean ohuigin (“another poem”), and
Caroline Parry (“Hello, Sir”). Big, bright, and bold, this
collection should be fun to read with young children.

Zoomerang a Boomerang is the revised edition of A Rhyme for Me.
Although the new title and the new, flamboyant pictures may make this
edition catchier, the original title revealed the character of the
poetry more accurately. Frequent repetition, strong, predictable
rhythms, and emphatic rhymes are the essence of the verbal playfulness
exhibited in the poems. These same qualities make the poems
(particularly those that children already know as songs) useful to
children just learning to read. This volume is least well served by its
subtitle—Poems to Make Your Belly Laugh—which oversimplifies the
tonal range of the collection and puts Martchenko in the awkward
position of trying to transform such pieces as Raffi’s meditative song
“Everything Grows” or the traditional Iroquois lullaby “Ho, Ho,
Watanay” into comic works. Though on the surface lacking some of the
pizzazz of Zoomerang a Boomerang, the first edition has a clearer sense
of its rhyme and reason.