Skywriting: Poems to Fly (for Poetry Flyday -- er, Friday)

Happy Poetry Friday, landlubbers and skylubbers. I've been reveling in the book pictured at left since it arrived in my mailbox a few days ago. SKYWRITING: POEMS TO FLY, written by J. Patrick Lewis and illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi, is a treasure trove of words and art about flying devices, from ornithopter to hot air balloon to space shuttle.

With simple, straightforward language that takes a whimsical turn about every four words, Lewis takes us through a history of soaring that most of us haven't witnessed before, all in one place.

Sure, we've all heard of Icarus, the Wright Brothers, and the Concorde. But how many of us know anything at all about the French Equestrian Balloon that actually carried pilots aloft on horseback?

Or the Marquis d'Equevilley's oval Multiplane, resembling a steamboat paddle with seven wings?

Or the bizarre-looking Piasecki V-8P Airgeep, a three-wheeled contraption with all kinds of metal protuberances that the U.S. Army dubbed the "Sky Car?"

Or the eye-popping Minerva balloon, which was designed to keep sixty people aloft for six months in a gondola-like structure with nearly a whole city inside?

Thirteen flying machines and thirteen poems make up the book, with a timeline and endnotes in the back for those who want to know more, more, more.

The clever poems are all structured differently and are all eminently readable. From the poem about the Concorde, which is shaped like the Concorde, to the one about the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk in which every brief line has the freshest, funnest rhymes --

metal Darth Vader
impersonator
invisible raider,
black jet aviator
and wicked wind-skater

-- nearly every poem is a little gem.

Or consider these words, from the poem about the Ornithopter:

While observers were whooping and clapping,
The pilot was happily snapping
Bird wings into place
For a wild goose chase,
And the plane was repeatedly flapping!

A goose accompanies the poem in the illustration.

And, speaking of illustrations, there is much fun stuff in Kubinyi's illustrations to hunt for and delight in. Notice the Minerva, shown in the cover illustration above. See the tiny row of houses and what looks like a circus tent on the upper rim of the balloon? In the interior illustration, not reproduced above, you can actually see a group of people gathered around the small, secondary balloon -- and a cat walking across the barrel below, reaching out its paw toward a passing bird!

The page about the Bell Rocket Belt -- a kind of jet pack thing -- shows the pilot launching himself beside the Galaxy Diner, surrounded by cars that were popular in 1961.

Each illustration is finely, carefully drawn to reflect the fashions and other indications of the time period when the flying craft flew (or attempted to leave the ground).

I'd have loved to scan in additional illustrations, but the book is not fitting well in my scanner. Nevertheless, find this book in your library or book store, and take it for a ride around the pattern.

Additional reviews of SKYWRITING: POEMS TO FLY can be found here and here.

Elaine Magliaro is flying the Poetry Friday hostess flag today at Wild Rose Reader. Please aviate on over and find a new runway or two to land on today in the poetrysphere. And check out Elaine's terrific "Things to do if you are a..." series of poems while you're there.