From Twenty Books of Verse published between 1940 and 1993, John Ciardi gives us poems of love written with care and honest discernment; poems of the natural world that reveal humanity's kinship to spiders and nebulae, oceans and thickets; and poems that tellingly render the ritual dance of human life and mortality.

Thirty-eight poems, mostly humorous, by the well-known poet. "Most children find Ciardi's tartness invigorating; most adults find his writing deceptively casual, intrinsically sophisticated." -- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Poems consider the past, parenthood, mortality, success, misunderstanding, sleep, love, and travel

In this study of Ciardi's life, Edward Cifelli has captured all the deep concern, passion, and thoughtfulness that marked Ciardi's long career in American letters. With care and penetrating detail, Cifelli evokes Ciardi's early childhood in Boston, his Italian heritage, his service as a gunner on a B-29 during World War II, and his years teaching at Harvard and Rutgers. Illuminated here are Ciardi's widely read contributions as an editor of Saturday Review and World magazines, as well as his tireless effort to bring an awareness and love of language and poetry to America through radio, television, the lecture circuit, and his twenty-six years on the staff of the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a gathering he directed for seventeen years.

‘Thirty-five imaginative and humorous poems for an adult and a child to read aloud together. . . . The entertaining verses are varied as to length, rhythm, and subject and are illustrated with harmoniously amusing drawings.’ —BL.

Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts."--BOOK JACKET.

For beginning readers, these poems lead children to new words through rhyme, riddles, context, and word game.