CITY I LOVE by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Hopkins, Lee Bennett. 2009. City I Love. Ill by Marcellus Hall. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers. ISBN 9780810983274.

Lee Bennett Hopkins of NCTE Poetry Award fame celebrates the city in City I Love. Being a city girl myself, I identified with many of the poems in this collection of 100% Hopkins. Eighteen famous cities are illustrated with the poems, but the poetry is universal to any city.  Hopkins capitalizes particularly on the sounds and rhythms in the city and compares it to a song in his opening line “Sing a song of cities.”  Words like roar, rumbles, laugh, loud, whoosh, beep, shouts, to name a few, make the urban cacophony sound musical.  But the collection engages other senses as well.  Visual words like “flicker, flash, glitter, gleam,” tasting words like “Hot dogs with sauerkraut” and “Cold drinks here!” make one see and taste the city.  You can feel the city heat as well in the poem called City Summer when even “the sun wears a sweatband,” and in City where “A hydrant is my swimming pool where friends and I find some cool.”  

Hopkins uses a variety of poetic formats and styles in his eighteen poems.  Some rhyme, some free verse, and even one Haiku, but all carry you along briskly.  His poems are like a subway-- short bursts of movement packed with rich and colorful images.  Much of the urban imagery of the skyscrapers, subways, bright lights, and street sweepers, would be lost on young children from the suburbs, in my opinion, but urban children would definitely “get it.”  The mood is upbeat, (after all it is City I LOVE), but you can also hear aggravation with winter snow “mush” and taxis that don’t stop on rainy days.  

Marcellus Hall complemented the text with his whimsical illustrations of brush and ink, and watercolor that to me are reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline.  The opening cover shows a map of the world with 17 major cities marked.  I took a picture walk through the book to see if I could recognize the cities from the subtle tells that the artist reveals.  I could not find the “answers” to this made up game to see if I had identified all 17 cities with the correct illustration, but it was fun playing the game.  I almost missed the little maple leaf on the cap of our little dog tourist that gave the clue of Toronto, Canada.  The dog tourist is the endearing traveler throughout the book who backpacks through the world along with his side kick, a young pigeon.

The sounds and rhythms of the city are celebrated in all the poems except for Mother’s Plea.  Rather than celebrating the city's sounds,  a mother pigeon is anxious about her newborn pigeon’s sleep amid the sirens, horns and roar of city traffic.  When sharing this poem with my kindergartners, I would precede it with Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings.  In that story, a mother duck is anxious to find a safe place to raise her ducklings, but in spite of her pains-taking search, she still has to contend with the dangers in the city.  Similarly, Mother’s Plea communicates the mother’s frustration and anxiety for her babies’ sleep in a noisy city.  The discussion could easily segue into share and sketch about a time when the students couldn’t sleep because of too much noise, a bad dream, or some other anxiety.  Owl Babies by Martin Waddell would be another good story about childhood anxiety that could precede or succeed the poem.

MOTHER'S PLEA
     by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Silence sirens.

Hush all horns.

Quiet rumbling

                    traffic roars.

Please
city
                    have
                    some
                    pity.

Promise me

                    not
                    one
                    more
                    beep?

My newborn

                    pigeons
                    need
                    their
                    sleep.

I have only visited five of the 17 illustrated cities, but City I Love has certainly whetted my travel appetite, and has put Lee Bennett Hopkins on my poetry map!