(Book Cover compliments of Titlewave)
Bibliography
Bryant, Jennifer, and Melissa Sweet. A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2008. ISBN 9780802853028
Review
A lavish picture-book biography about William Carlos Williams, Jennifer Bryant brings to life the poet who from his youngest years learned to notice everything. His rambling boyhood walks and hours exploring outdoors helped him learn to listen to the Passaic River’s “Gurgle, gurgle—swish, swish, swoosh!—gurgle, gurgle./ The water went slipping and sliding over/ the smooth rocks, then poured in a torrent/ over the falls…” Bryant’s imagery and word choice paint a picture of Williams as a young observer of life who found his own simple style of poetry free from the confines of famous poetry styles that instead made him “feel free as the Passaic River as it rushed to the falls.” Williams value for the simple things in life…like a red wheelbarrow, plums, birds, children’s games…helped him keep noticing and writing poetry even while pursuing a medical degree and ultimately caring for children for years as a pediatrician.
In an interview shortly after A River of Words received the 2009 Caldecott Award, Poet Jennifer Bryant talked about her choice to write this poetic biography in the form of “poetic prose or lyrical prose. I do try to pay attention to repetition, sound, and imagery—all of which play a big part in this text…” Bryant’s free verse style and sparse writing compliment the richly-detailed mixed-media illustrations by Melissa Sweet who uses book covers, Dr.’s prescription pads, old report cards as canvases for watercolor drawings, hand-drawn pieces of William’s poems, and snippets of vintage-type words to create collage art with impact. The illustrations are whimsical and yet elegant. An especially powerful spread contains a silhouette of Williams writing in a lit attic window in his house created from an open book cover against a dark night sky made from an old map of star constellations where “Willie took out his pen and his notes./ He sat down and looked at the words.../ …and shaped them into poems.”
