The first half of this book glitters like a mine full of gems - that is, the author spins off in quick succession idea after idea about what poetry is and how writing poetry can be taught. Quoting countless poems to illustrate his points, he tosses out useful advice about evoking poetic writing, developing language precision, and sharing poetic writing. These discussions are annotated in the back of the book with references to 50 writing starters on reproducible handouts Grades 4-6. Bibliography. Illustrated. Good Year Books. 115 pages.

Reviews 1,400 books for children chosen as the best published during the years 1966-1972.

The noise gathered from a lifetime of engaging with war, race, religion, memory, illness, and family echoes through the vignettes, quotations, graffiti, and poetry that Donald Anderson musters here, fragments of the humor and horror of life, the absurdities that mock reason and the despair that yields laughter. Gathering Noise from My Life offers sonic shards of a tune at once jaunty and pessimistic, hopeful and hopeless, and a model for how we can make sense of the scraps of our lives. “We are where we’ve been and what we’ve read,” the author says, and gives us his youth in Montana, the family tradition of boxing, careers in writing and fighting, the words of Mike Tyson, Frederick the Great, Fran Lebowitz, and Shakespeare. In his camouflaged memoir, the award-winning short-story writer cobbles together the sources of the vision of life he has accrued as a consequence of his six decades of living and reading.

Describes the contents of a wide range of recommended poetry books for children from preschool age to 7th grade.