It wasn’t too many days ago I talked about awesome acrostic poems.  They really do exist!  Today I will tell you about an awesome book that grabbed my attention from another blog (and I simply had to track down the book to read).

I read about this book on another blog a while back and I was just fascinated with the premise of the poetry collection.  I tried to find it at my library but it’s published in the UK so the library wasn’t an option with this one.  I decided that the book was worthy of purchase (as part of the proceeds went to conservation efforts AND the book looked pretty darn amazing).  It’s NOT a picture book for children, per se, but maybe more of a coffee table book.  Even though the reviews I read online warned that the book was huge, I really had no concept.  So let me do a size comparison for you to a well known picture book so you get the idea.

It’s HUGE!  And the premise is So cool that I decided to let the author’s foreword explain (rather than mangle the message):

The concept of words being forgotten–of nature being forgotten boggled my mind.  And yet it made sense.  I love history and have studied many a mystery lost to the sands of time found years later by archaeological digs well enough to know that yes, we forget and we lose and we move on.  Isn’t age, that great forgetter of memories and the flotsam and jetsam of our own lives, evidence enough of that?  But I digress.

This book is such an interesting format.  First you are presented with a jumble of letters in which to search and find the subject of the next poem:

Then you have the poem with a beautiful picture beside it with that wonderfully textured gold background (I picked a favorite poem from the collection):

It took me a few poems to realize that these were acrostic poems!

Then you are given a full double page spread (and it looks ginormous in this book) on the next page of the poem’s subject in its natural setting:

This collection is full of both text that sings and pictures that fascinate.  I love it!  I definitely think it was worth the purchase to read and I’m sure I will visit its pages many times again.