A Maze Me: Poems for Girls

I bought this book at an airport for my daughter- but I read it out loud to her and her little brother, and we all enjoyed it. The poems are fun and sad and funny and insightful. It led me to seek out other works by Nye and I've enjoyed them all.

Naomi Shihab Nye has a relationship with words and Emotions that few people achieve in their life, regardless of their age. She is my favorite poet as well as my favorite author and I have never dislike one of her poems. A Maze Me is no exception. Every poem sends a strong message or fills you with a feeling or new idea. Each poem is written so beautifully that no illustration is needed, as it probes curiosity and imaginitive explanations. In my opinion, Naomi Shihab Nye is very philosophical, and this thinking appears through metaphors that are evenly distributed throughout her literature. A Maze Me is an incredible set of poems and your life will not be complete until you have read this.

This book by the sublime Naomi Shihab Nye is subtitled "Poems for Girls," but I don't think that this charming book should be restricted to one gender. I certainly chuckled, oohed, and aahed a number of times as I read through it. (Still, it WOULD make a great gift for the young girl in your life.) Shihab Nye has a generosity of spirit that shines through her poetry like a twinkle in a kindly aunt's eye. Here is a little somethin'-somethin' to whet your appetite (excerpted from "Ringing"): "Now, when I hear an ice-cream truck chiming its bells, I fly Even if I'm not hungry -- just to watch it pass. Mailmen with their chime of dogs barking up and down the street are magic too. They are all bringers. I want to be a bringer. I want to drive a truck full of eggplants down the smallest street. I want to be someone making music with my coming."

Once I read Naomi Shihab Nye's introduction, I felt I was about to turn the pages of something very special. I was right. This unique collection of poems gives the reader a chance to look at familiar life in a new way. Full of nostalgia, intimate and humorous, tender and tearful, this is a book I would love to underline and memorize. I look forward to writing in my own notebook, trying to find the poet in me.

"Ringing A baby, I stood in my crib to hear the dingy-ding of a vegetable truck approaching. When I was bigger, my mom took me out to the street to meet the man who rang the bell and he tossed me a tangerine... ...the first thing I ever caught. I thought he was a magic man. My mom said there used to be milk trucks too. She said, Look hard, he'll be gone soon. And she was right. He disappeared. Now when I hear an ice-cream truck chiming its bells, I fly. Even if I'm not hungry--just to watch it pass. Mailmen with their chime of dogs barking up and down the street are magic too. They are all bringers. I want to be a bringer. I want to drive a truck full of eggplants down the smallest street. I want to be someone making music with my coming." And so she is. And so she does. A great joy that accompanies a new book of poems by Naomi Shihab Nye is the expectation that she will begin reappearing at national conferences and conventions, reading aloud from her latest collection. The good feeling I've taken away with me from her past workshops is about as close as I get to church these days. A MAZE ME contains seventy-two of Naomi's latest poems. Younger teens will find these pieces easy to read and relate to. Hopefully, many will be intrigued and inspired by Naomi's ability to create poetry from such sources as a car manual, a newspaper article, a taco sign, "the hair on the head of the girl in front of me in school," Julia Child's patting potatoes, or a vapor trail "X" that a pair of planes have inadvertently left in the sky. Being a book of "Poems for Girls" there are also the requisite handful of "longing" poems: "High Hopes It wasn't that they were so high, exactly, they were more low-down, close-to-the-ground, I could rub them the way you touch a cat that rubs against your ankles even if he isn't yours. So yes I feel lonely without them. Now that I know the truth, that I only dreamed someone liked me, the cat has curled up in a bed of leaves against the house and I still have to do everything I had to do before without a secret hum inside." Despite being a guy, I really enjoyed the images and memories conjured up by these poems. Whether reading "Visiting My Old Kindergarten Teacher, Last Day of School," "Turtle" (about the persistent creature that had walked for twenty years), or "Across the Aisle" (about the little girl who coughed "every 30 seconds for seven whole hours" on a transatlantic flight), I've repeatedly interrupted Rosemary's reading on the couch and Shari's grading papers at the kitchen table in order to have an audience with whom to share the poems aloud. "Big Head, Big Face (what my brother said to me) If your head had been smaller maybe you woulda had less thoughts in it, maybe you wouldn't have so many troubles. This is just a guess but seems to me like a little drawer only hold a few spoons and you can always find the one you need while a big drawer jammed with tongs strings