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| Image courtesy of SLJ Blog |
Review and Critical Analysis
Lee Bennett Hopkins’s City I Love celebrates the sights and sounds of urban life through 18 poems about the subways and taxis and skyscrapers and the noises that fill the city. While the content of the poems could apply to any city, the accompanying illustrations of iconic landmarks like the Washington monument, Big Ben, and the Great Pyramids clearly set each poem in a particular city. Additionally, the endpapers display a world map pinpointing the 18 major cities featured in the illustrations. Young readers will enjoy spotting the cartoon dog, who has donned a backpack to set out on his world travels with his partner, a little blue bird. The traveling companions appear somewhere in each illustration throughout the book.The poems in City I Love take a variety of shapes and forms, including haiku, free verse, and rhyming couplets. Though the poems contain plenty of concrete visual imagery like descriptions of the sun as “fiery/orange-red” in “City Summer,” the sound devices Hopkins employs are the star of the book. The very first poem “Sing a Song of Cities” sets the tone for the entire book as it begins, “Sing a song of cities/If you do,/Cities will sing back/to you,” establishing a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur from the city. From there, onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm take over to create the hustle and bustle of the city for readers. The subway “roars and rumbles,” water is “pouring/roaring/gushing/rushing” from hydrants, and people shout “Taxi!” and “Hot dogs with sauerkraut/Get ‘em here!” Each poem adds another layer of city sounds to the description.
The illustrations by New Yorker artist Marcellus Hall take the poems to another level. The large, colorful brush, ink, and watercolor city scenes dominate most of the spreads. The one to two poems on each spread mostly sit along sidebars or in the negative space of the sky, but occasionally, the poems and illustrations are so intertwined determining which came first is a challenge. For example, a full-spread line of cars and double-decker buses drive right through the middle of the poem titled “Taxi!” and words of “Subways Are People” follow the same v-shape as the lines of perspective in the drawing of the people on a subway, ending near the picture’s vanishing point. The beautiful artwork alone makes this book worth a second read. I find something new every time I pick it up.
City I Love will provide readers with plenty of entertainment and enjoyment. The poems about city life will ring true with children from cities, yet the content--with bridges, kites, and summer--is so universal that children from rural areas can still connect with the poems for a new learning experience about cities. The illustrations are engaging, providing the perfect opportunity for exploration with friends, siblings, or parents. Plus, the wide range of cultures reflected in the specific cities highlighted simply beg for further exploration to learn about the cities or find pictures of the real landmarks online.
Example Poem
"City I Love"
In the city
I live in--
city I love--
mornings wake
to swishes, swashes,
sputters
of sweepers
swooshing litter
from gutters.
In the city
I live in--
city I love--
afternoons pulse
with
people hurrying,
scurrying--
races of faces
pacing to
must-get-there
places.
In the city
I live in--
city I love--
nights shimmer
with lights
competing
with stars above
unknown heights.
In the city
I live in--
city I love--
as dreams start to creep
my city
of senses
lulls
me
to
sleep.
Activity
Before reading this poem with children, I would introduce the poem by asking if they live in the city or in the country, and I invite them to share what sounds they might hear on a daily basis where they live. For younger children, we could make one collaborative list of sounds, or older students might want to make their own lists of sounds and then share a few ideas.After reading the poem I would ask students if they heard any of their sounds in the poem, or if anything in the poem reminds them of where they live. As a follow up, students could write a poem, using the first three lines “In the city/I live in--/city I love--” to begin their own stanzas. As necessary, they could change “city” to a more appropriate term like “town,” “country,” or--for the East Texans-- “woods.”
