IBBY Honour List: Irish poem

Here's one more "international poetry video"-- this time featuring an Irish poem for children. It's from a book on another international book list, the IBBY Honour List, a biennial selection of outstanding, recently published books, honouring writers, illustrators and translators from IBBY member countries around the world. The titles are selected by the National Sections which can nominate one book for each of the three categories: writing, illustrating, and translating. The whole 2011 list is available here.

Important considerations in selecting the Honour List titles are that the books are representative of the best in children's literature from the country and that the books are suitable for publication throughout the world.

The Honour List diplomas are presented at the IBBY Congresses where the catalogue is introduced and the books are shown for the first time. Thereafter seven parallel sets of the books circulate around the world at exhibitions during conferences and book fairs. Permanent collections of the IBBY Honour List books are kept at the International Youth Library in Munich, the Swiss Institute for Child and Youth Media in Zurich, Bibiana Research Collection in Bratislava, at IBBY in Tokyo, and at Northwestern University Library at Evanston, Illinois.

I wrote about the IBBY Honour List last year when the list was first announced. But this year, I was able to corral a colleague into letting me film her reading a poem. Here's the featured book.

IRELAND (Irish)
Ní Ghlinn, Áine
Brionglóidí agus aistir eile
(Dreams and other journeys)
Ill. Carol Betera
Clár Chlainne Mhuiris: Cló Mhaigh Eo, 2008
84pp; 130x200mm
ISBN 978-1-899922-49-9 Ages: 10-13
Poetry

This collection of 40 poems on the theme of dreams encompasses an interesting range of voices guaranteed to bring a fresh perspective to the ordinary. A mouse dreams of sprouting wings to swoop like a bird-of-prey on its enemy the cat, while a dinosaur skeleton in the natural history museum imagines falling in love and fathering the first dinosaur babies in sixty-five million years. A school trip to Mars, a library in which characters are dislodged from their books and a flirtation between the sun and a grey cloud, are just some of the surprising happenings in this vibrant collection. The poems are rhythmic, the imagery vivid and the language musical. While each poem is a gem in itself, the themes are beautifully developed in the collection as a whole.

My friend and colleague, Valerie Coghlan, a children's literature expert in Ireland (and President and former editor of Bookbird) read the poem, "The Wind of the Year" from this book. Check it out:




Image credit: SV

; IBBY

Posting (not poem) by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2011. All rights reserved.