Salting the Ocean

Bibliography

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets. Illus. by Ashley Bryan. Hong Kong: Greenwillow Books, 2000. 978-0688161934

Review

This is a collection of poems selected by Naomi Shihab Nye from young poets who she has had the opportunity to work with as she traveled and taught students about the art of writing. The poems vary in length, meaning, and purpose but they all represent the thoughts of a young poet.

“The Storm in Me” by Theresa Ann Garcia has a repetitive rhythm except in between two of the stanzas is a line: “Sadness in my body” in which the whole poem seems to stop (Garcia, p. 27). This poem in particular slows the reader down as if pausing to reflect with a whisper about how she feels.

Similes can bring so much to a poem without using an abundance of words. Vargas describes “a story which gets into my heart and stays there like a diamond in a ring” that shows this boys devotion to his grandfather at keeping his stories locked up in his heart (Vargas, p. 61). The entire poem on page 60 by Ernest Beache is personifying inanimate objects and animals as the people in her family such as her dad like a “volcano”, her sister like “King Kong” and herself like “an and stuck in a coffin” (Beache, p. 60).

To evoke imagery through the senses in poetry is like breathing fresh air into a poem: it truly is living. Sound is imminently heard by the reader in the poem, “Winter” when “the coolness crackles and burns in the fireplace” (Cassidy, p. 43). Caballero describes a character in his poem as having “a voice like talking in a cave” (Caballero, p. 36) which paints a perfect picture of a large, booming, echo-like voice.

The students who wrote the poems come together to show issues that children today face and help readers to see things in different ways. Many of these poems had a true impact on me such as “Grandmother” by Sandra Scherbenske on page 75 which has a granddaughter asking when her grandmother could go out on her own and her grandmother answers that she was never ready to go into the world alone. I am truly impressed by the poetry I have read by these talented children who were expressing themselves through poetry.

Poem & Connection

My mother is a shell

And you can always hear

The ocean.

By Brenda Garcia

(Garcia, p. 69)

Read this poem aloud with students and then present them with a large conch sea shell. Have students read the poem in unison and then call on volunteers to read the poem. Let each student take a turn at listening to the inside of the shell.