CITY I LOVE

CITY I LOVE 

by Lee Bennett Hopkins

 Illustrated by Marcellus Hall

Image credit: www.commonsensemedia.com

Bibliography

Hopkins, Lee Bennett.  2009. City I Love. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers.  ISBN 9780810983274

Critical Review and Analysis

This book is a collection of poems written by the award-winning poet Lee Bennett Hopkins.  These poems take the reader on an international journey as each one conjures images of an urban location from around the world.  From Venice, to Tokyo, to New York City, eighteen of the world's largest cities are depicted in the poems and illustrations.

Marcellus Hall uses brush and ink and bright watercolors to show a backpacking dog traveling around the world.  The paintings show various types of architecture along with some recognizable landmarks like Big Ben, the Pyramids, and the Golden Gate Bridge stretching across a double-page spread.  The cities that are shown in each poem are also marked on a breezy blue-green world map on the endpapers of the book.  

Though the illustrations are delightful, the poetry is what brings to life the bustling city on each page. This is a themed collection of poems that each focus on some aspect of living in a urban setting. Though the entire collection is penned by Hopkins, the poems vary in length and tone.  Most of the poems are free verse with exception of "Sparrow", a haiku.  Hopkins utilizes many poetic elements that make these poems so much fun to read aloud.  There is personification in "Mother's Plea" which is written from the point of view of an annoyed mother pigeon pleading with noisy traffic in Paris.   The metaphor of the poem "Subways Are People" is obvious as the busy subway is described as "People dashing / Steel flashing / Up and down and round the town".  In "City I Love", the alliterative description of the street sweeper as it "swishes, swashes / sputters / of sweepers / swooshing litter" is a almost a tongue twister.  

Spotlight Poem

CITY

by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Mile-long skyscrapers are my trees 

Subway's whoosh -- my summer breeze.

A hydrant is my swimming pool

Where friends and I find some cool. 

City is the place to be.

City is the place for me.

CITY is a poem that celebrates the ways that urban dwellers enjoy certain aspects of life differently than others, but they still love it.  It is written in rhyming couplets with several metaphors in this short poem.   This poem and others in the collection could be easily integrated with Social Studies curriculum when learning about urban, suburban, and rural communities.

I would introduce this poem by asking students if they have ever visited downtown Dallas or other large city.  What did it look like?  What did it sound like?  What was different about it from their own town?  Then, I would explain that in this poem, the poet describes how people in cities enjoy their summer.  After reading this poem aloud and discussing the descriptions of city life, I would invite students to write their own poem about where they live.