Poetry

Click on any of the titles below to reach a downloadable PDF of the piece of writing.

Cadence and Nonsense: Dennis Lee’s Poems for Children and Adults

The Craft or Sullen Art of a Mouse and a Bat: A discussion of two children’s books about animals who write poetry: Leo Lionni’s Frederick and Randal Jarrell’s The Bat Poet and the attitudes towards poetry they encourage in their readers.

Long Underwear and Christian Verse: A consideration of how mainstream children’s literature criticism ignores texts published by religious publishers

The Nursery Rhymes of Mother Goose: A World without Glasses

The Silver Honkabeest: Children and the Meaning of Childhood: A discussion of some poems for children by the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, focussing on how “childhood” in these poems develops symbolic meanings for audiences of both adults and children

Who’s Speaking: the Voices of Dennis Lee’s Poems for Children