Carnival of the Animals: Poems Inspired by Saint-Saens' Music [With CD]

I purchased this book for my daughter for her eighth birthday. I'm positive she will enjoy for a long time to come. The illustrations are beautiful as are the poems. She has a few different versions of this book and this is thoroughly enjoyable.

This book is a great representation of carnival of the animals. The artwork I feel brings out the character of the animals in a way that matches the music. It seems to fit in well with a kids imagination. I like the orchestral peices too. Each version i have heard of Carnival of the animals is a little different, none the less, I quite enjoyed this one. It is certainly an all time classic for any storybook library.

This is one of the few books I've borrowed from the library and then felt a need to purchase. My 7-yr old son, my 4-yr old daughter, and I all loved the poetry and illustrations as well as the readings and of course the music. What a wonderful find!

None of us get enough poetry in our lives. Our day-to-day interactions rarely cause us to stop and consider a work of Dickinson or even ponder a dollop of Frost. New Yorkers, however, have it easy. They get to see poetry every day. Thanks to the Poems on the Underground program that started in London and spread across the Atlantic, I get to read poems on the subway to and from work almost every day. So who should I thank for this chance to broaden my mind while crammed into someone's armpit? Thank Judith Chernaik, the founder of the same project. Now, however, Chernaik has expanded into the skittish world of children's literature. With Saint-Saens' light-hearted musical creation, "Carnival of the Animals" as her inspiration, she has culled poems from the brains of thirteen poets (including herself). In turn, Candlewick Press brought in well-established illustrator Satoshi Kitamura to whip up some pretty pictures for the equally pretty poems. The result is a wild concoction of image and sound. Poems leap off the page almost as beautifully as their visual counterparts. I have absolutely no idea who this book is supposed to be for in the end, but it's certainly nice enough to look at. There are fourteen poems in all (no Table of Contents, sorry), with thirteen dedicated to the animals featured in Saint-Saens' music. Without so much as an Introduction, we immediately hit upon James Berry's faintly melancholy thoughts on the lion. From there we are whisked into a wild array of poems and animals. Gavin Ewart gives your average kangaroo a fairly metropolitan feel. Valerie Bloom tackles Saint-Saens', "The Aviary" and wins the book's Most Evocative Award. By the end we see the animals we've met now all on a stage with instruments in hand. The performance is done, and you are left remembering as wild an amalgamation of poetry, music, and visual art as you'll ever find again. Kitamura's style of illustration has never done anything for me in the past. It's always struck me as cute but lacking. Now, as if to show me how wrong I've always been, Kitamura's pictures in this book burst from the pages with a kind of frenzied glee. He's gone haywire with "Carnival". Watercolors may be sepia toned one minute and then show an equallly dignified image of horses running across a green grass plain. The poem "Pianists" manages to be well-ordered around the text, and then explode into a sumptuous feast of colors and images comparable only to what happens when you close your eyes and press hard on your eyelids. His tortoises dance, his swan looks as if it should be accompanied by a haiku, and about the time you reach the dinosaur bones playing the clarinet you'll never want to leave the book again. But who was this written for? Admittedly it's fairly easy to tell from the start that these were not children's poets Chernaik tapped. So perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised when Gerard Benson likens donkeys to theater critics or Gillian Clarke