Poetry Week by Week: Concrete Poems: Review of WET CEMENT

WET CEMENT: A MIX OF CONCRETE POEMS is a recently released book of poems by Bob Raczka. In the introduction to this book, Raczka describes poems as "word paintings. A poet uses words like colors to paint pictures inside your head." Of course, in a concrete poem, the idea of a word painting is a bit more literal; the words are arranged in such a way as to take on the shape of the poem's subject. Raczka takes it further and makes a picture with the title of each poem too!

I love this book. The poems are short and simple, yet worded and arranged so perfectly that you can't help but read them over again and gaze in appreciation at the images cleverly created on the page.

My favorite in this collection is Firefly, which is arranged in white letters on a black page. I can't show it here, so you will just have to get your hands on the book to see for yourself how wonderful it is. You can see an example of one of the other poems, Hopscotch, here.

If you are looking for a good poetry book to share with your students or children this Poetry Month, I highly recommend WET CEMENT!