Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems

Have you ever wondered what you’d get if you crossed a panther and a thermometer? How about an umbrella and an elephant? Well, it just so happens that you’re in luck, because author Jack Prelutsky and illustrator Carin Berger have answered those questions in their book, Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and Other Poems.

 In this very creative and amusing collection of poems, Prelutsky tells of wonderfully inventive creatures and their unique abilities. Each of the 17 poems sprang from the author’s imaginative pairing of an inanimate object and a real animal, like the ever on time Clocktopus. Each of the poems has been created with a strong rhythm and can automatically be read in a sing-song manner, even in your head! Most of the poems are also written in rhyming line pairs, which creates a smooth transition from one poem to the next.

If you thought that the poetry was the only thing in this book to get your creative juices flowing, you’d be wrong because the illustrations take Umbrellaphant to a whole new level. To create the illustrations, Carin Berger used a cut paper collage method to model the creatures in the book, effectively taking actual bits of paper (ticket stubs, catalogs, etc.) and molding them into the shapes of real life animals, albeit with new man-made appendages.

I think this collection is a great way to introduce elementary students to the silly and imaginative side of poetry. After reading these poems you could ask your students or children for that matter, to think of their own animal-object combo and create their own poems, which as Jack Prelutsky is quick to point out on his website, don’t have to rhyme! He says that learning how to play with the rhythm of words and how to arrange your ideas is the most important concept when you’re just beginning to write poetry. I love that he went out of his way to say this, because as a child sorting through and finding all the right rhyming words can be a daunting challenge in and of itself.

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of poems and would definitely recommend it to elementary students grade 3 and up, particularly because some of the vocabulary could be challenging for younger children. However words like resplendent and reverberate would also create a great segue into other language arts lessons. So, go out, pick up this book and introduce, or reintroduce, someone to the fun poetry they're missing!