LS5663 - Module 3 - Free Verse - Book Review

Rylant, Cynthia. 1994. Something permanent. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. Photographs by Walker Evans. ISBN 9780152770907.

After reading this book and pondering the incredible photographs, I believe that this book of free verse poetry was written specifically to accompany these pictures. This photographer was hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the country during the Great Depression. They are fascinating, and now Ms. Rylant has created poetry that matches them very well, depicting the lives of rural tenant families in Alabama.

The poems are short, some very short, and they are all accompanied by a photo. The poetry provides a lot of emotional impact, some of it heart wrenching, some a little funny or quirky. This time in American history was quite devastating, financially and emotionally. Many had so few possessions, and what they had was very precious and valuable to them. The free verse poetry allows glimpses into that mindset, setting the tone and the mood that the reader feels when reading it aloud. I also feel that the emotion is stronger because of the photographs. The sensory image of "sight" is powerful here and allows the reader's mind to wander and connect to familiar items or experiences in our own lives.

This is an interesting book, not only for the poetry, but for the historical insight that it provides. It is a different way to deliver this information to the reader, rather than a textbook, movie, or documentary. This is something that I would refer a history teacher to, as well as a Language Arts instructor.

One of the free verse poems that most impressed me was:

Shoes

When he finally died, they kept

them around the house

the longest time,

tripping on them,

arranging them beneath the beds,

occasionally borrowing them

in bad weather.

Then the preacher told them

it was a sacrilege to the dead,

moving those shoes around

like a couple of mop buckets.

So they left them out at the cemetery one day,

and of course the shoes promptly disappeared.

It was impossible for them, after that,

to keep from looking down at the feet of every

person who crossed their path.

And this would have gone on probably forever

had not one of his hats

turned up

way in the back of the closet.

This poem will leave a lump in your throat if you dwell on it, and perhaps have just lost someone close to you. Those personal items become so precious, especially if you don't have many of them.

I think that I would read some of these poems out loud to high school students, showing them the photographs, along with a brief discussion of the Depression. I would especially point out how the impact of the poems are perhaps more powerful due to the acompanying pictures. It would an interesting extension project to have students pick out one of their favorite poems and then to either find a picture that matches it, or to take a photograph themselves of what they think describes the poem. They could then display this on a bulletin board, and discuss why they chose the picture for that particular piece of poetry. It would be a very interesting project!