Maze Me: Poems for Girls

Book: Maze Me: Poems for Girls , by Naomi Shihab Nye, Terre Maher, ISBN10: 0060581891, ISBN13: 9780060581893, HarperCollins Publishers, March 2005, Hardcover

Naomi Shihab Nye was so depressed on her twentieth birthday that she refused to celebrate. She thought childhood was now behind her (wrong). She called writer Jack Kerouac's widow, Stella, in Florida to say she was thinking of Jack (they have the same birthday). Stella invited her to come down and visit. Things improved from then on.

Life is a tangle of twisting paths.
Some short.
Some long.
There are dead ends.
And there are choices.
And wrong turns,
and detours,
and yield signs,
and instruction booklets,
and star maps,
and happiness,
and loneliness.
And friends.
And sisters.
And love.
And poetry.

Life is a maze.
You are a maze.
Amazed.
And amazing.

Publishers Weekly

Nye's (Going Going, reviewed above) sprawling collection of more than 70 poems run the gamut from capturing a moment to probing more abstract ideas and many seem right for a wider audience than just females. The best poems take a detailed image and expose its wider application to daily life. For instance, in Rose, a spider and her delicate web offer a lesson in the beauty that results from measured, persistent care. Big Head, Big Face boasts the merits of simplicity by contrasting a small drawer with a big drawer. Several poems on vocabulary grow awkwardly abstract. The Word Peace takes a common school exercise (making many small words from the letters in one long word) and distorts the idea just enough to be confusing (Peace for example contained the crucial vowels of/ Eat and Easy. If people Ate together/ they would be less likely to Kill one another). But there's plenty of humor here in contemplating language, too. Take the poem You're Welcome! (People who say No problem'/ instead of You're welcome'/ have a problem they don't even/ know about) or a baby-sitter's claim that Baby-sitting should not be called/ sitting. Because it is chasing, bending,/ picking up, and major play. Maher's attractive illustrations open each section. Despite a few uneven selections, Nye's talent is ever in evidence, especially with a trio of Wallace Stevensstyle meditations on a Little Chair and lines such as this one in Over the Weather: Creamy miles of quiet/ Giant swoop of blue. Ages 12-up. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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