Sprinkles reviews The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka

Sprinkles has already reviewed several poetry books for the book bunnies blog. Besides single-poet collections, she has also reviewed a handful of anthologies as well as a neat collection of poems by three contemporary poets celebrating a wide range of well-known poets. Today she is reviewing another anthology, The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects, curated by Paul B. Janeczko, illustrated by Chris Raschka, and first published in 2015.

You can take a quick peek into the book here: The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects.

The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects is an interesting collection. The title might give you a hint about what to expect: you might imagine that this will likely be a collection of fifty poems each about a particular object, and the whole collection will likely give us a sense of the history of poetry. And you would be right, mostly.

So yes, most of the poems are about concrete objects, like a hat (the titular poem “The Death of the Hat” by Billy Collins) or a just-finishing candle (a poem by Rumi) or simply the letter E, my favorite (by George Gordon, Lord Byron, who just happens to be the father of Ada Lovelace):

A Riddle, On the Letter E by George Gordon, Lord Byron

The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space
The beginning of every end, and the end of every place. 

But there are also quite a few poems which are about nature and natural beings. You can call them objects, sure, but I feel like they do not quite fit the term. Like snowflakes (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), the midnight frost (Basho), the sun (Ben Jonson), an eagle (Lord Alfred Tennyson), and so on. Still, they are concrete, and I suppose, do make a category that excludes topics like spirituality, romantic love, meaning of life and so on.

The history bit is worth mentioning. The time periods are described at the beginning; the curator of the collection, Paul B. Janeczko, in his introduction gives us a quick recap of the history of Western poetry, mainly focusing on what can be gleaned in poetry written in English. This is helpful and provides the reader some guidelines as they dive into the book. But then we find several poems that were translated into English! Now this is exciting, the poems are all exquisite themselves, but assigning to them the Euro-centric (or rather English-centric) period names feels a bit off then. For example, when you are reading poems from “the Renaissance”, you do not expect to find Basho from Japan, Emperor Le Thanh Tong from Vietnam or Kim Ku from Korea. The timelines work of course (1500s-late 1600s), and I was really excited by the diversity of the poets in the book. But the time period names still disoriented me a bit.

The book is a delight nonetheless, and I recommend it highly to any bunnies young or old. Especially if you want to enjoy some beautiful poetry in company of inspiring water colored sketches on each page. The illustrations by Chris Raschka definitely add an extra something to the book, sometimes whimsical, sometimes elegant, but always interesting, to each page. All in all, a wonderful collection to be read and savored.