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<\/p>\n{Note: You can click on that spread to enlarge and see it in more detail; you’ll just have to wait a bit for the download.}<\/em><\/p>\n On this Poetry Friday I highlight a book published by Creative Editions (hubba whoa, they make some beautiful books) in August of ’09, written by J. Patrick Lewis<\/strong><\/a> and illustrated by Italian illustrator Roberto Innocenti. It’s an over-sized, lovingly-designed book (as many of Creative Edition’s books are), called The House<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, which chronicles—via quatrains—the life of a stone-and-mortar house, the “House of twenty thousand tales,” constructed in 1656. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The house sees, as already mentioned, matrimony, birth, and death — but also war, “{c}atastrophe, despair and hatred,” some solitude and neglect (“Mold is my master after twenty years \/ And I am captive to this solitude”), military occupation, a hippie or two, and—in its final stage just before the dawn of the new millennium—a little bit of excess. A modern family renovates the home, adding a pool and a guard dog. “What became of the maxim, More is less?” Lewis writes. “Yet always I shall feel the sun and rain, \/ True keepers of the deed to my domain.” <\/p>\n Lewis writes with compassion from the house’s point-of-view. Writes School Library Journal<\/em>, the “formal tone, sophisticated vocabulary, and preoccupation with life’s inevitable losses register the sensibility of an older and somewhat melancholy speaker: ‘From wife to widow\u2026and the depths of grief.\/My furnace burns as children leave for school,\/Bundled in virtue, books, and classroom fuel.\/How beautiful their innocence, how brief,'” and Kelly Fineman writes in her detailed review<\/strong><\/a>, “Lewis’s quatrains are evocative and in many ways complex, despite the ‘simplicity’ of the form.” Indeed. Gracing the 1958 spread: “The widow pours her milk and with a spoon \/ Stirs melancholy past the afternoon. \/ What bags her son has packed to move away \/ Contain all vestiges of yesterday.” <\/p>\n If you look at the cover and think, hey, they got the billing all wrong<\/em>, no worries. You’ll see here, as the poet himself explains, the illustrations came first. I’ll let the esteemed Mr. Lewis do the talking, with thanks to him for stopping by: <\/p>\n When Tom then asked me to consider the art for <\/em>The House (2009), I was tickled and astonished in equal measure. The concept of the same house appearing in double-page spreads fifteen times over the course of the 20th century\u2014through war, famine, depression and modernity\u2014was breathtakingly original. <\/p>\n Roberto and I did not \u201ccollaborate\u201d in the sense of working cheek by jowl to finish the project. We have never met, never spoken. Again, his art came first, then my words. I can’t count how many revisions my book-length poem\u2014one quatrain per page\u2014went through before we thought we had it just right. But in the end, I freely confess, the art wins the day, as it does in all of Roberto\u2019s books. It\u2019s simply a privilege to hitch my wagon to the Hans-Christian-Andersen-Award-winner\u2019s star.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n A sumptuous book. Thanks to Pat for stopping by and to the publisher for the art. Oh, that reminds me:<\/p>\n THE HOUSE. Copyright \u00a9 2009 by J. Patrick Lewis. Illustrations \u00a9 2009 by Roberto Innocenti. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Creative Editions, Mankato, MN.<\/em><\/p>\nThe house’s story begins when a family, living in 1900, find the house in the woods and decide to inhabit it after fixing it up a bit. Lewis and Innocenti then move us forward in time: First, a 1915 wedding (“Life holds its breath when weddings intervene”); the bride’s first child in 1916 (the illustration opposite this quatrain, incidentally, depicts a mother breastfeeding, which one rarely<\/em> sees in picture books: Kudos to Innocenti for this); the death of the woman’s husband in 1918 (“From wife to widow … and the depths of grief”); and so on. Each poem has an illustration facing on the opposite page, along with the time period, and is then followed by a gorgeous, wordless, very detailed, and near-to-bursting spread that takes up every inch of air on the pages and is rendered in a very painterly, realistic style. (Booklist<\/em> once described Innocenti’s illustrations as “hyperrealistic.”) It’s almost breathtaking this book is. <\/p>\n
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The chance to work with Roberto Innocenti\u2014and now for the second time\u2014was a bit of Irish-Italian luck that fell to me, for which I am unable to express sufficient gratitude. It all began when Tom Peterson, the publisher of exquisitely beautiful books called Creative Editions, asked me to write the text to Roberto\u2019s art for a book that became <\/em>The Last Resort<\/strong><\/a> (Creative Editions, 2002), the story of an artist who loses his imagination and sets out on a quest to find it. The barely-disguised Roberto ends up at a seaside hotel whose residents are characters from literature\u2014Huck Finn, the Little Mermaid, Long John Silver, and the like. And it\u2019s here that he rediscovers himself. <\/p>\n