The Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night by Joyce Sidman

Here is a more serious poetry book that couples really good writing with lovely illustrations. Sidman has written 12 poems about the night in a forest. Some are about animals, and others about trees or the moon. Some of the poems are rhymed and metered, while others are free verse or concrete poems. The rhyming poems are really well done, with careful attention to meter and form. The free verse poems are also good with sensitivity to the sound and rhythm of the words. A good poet manages to make the words flow naturally, and you never get the sense that they were forced into a certain word choice by the structure of the poem. Sidman pulls this off really quite well.

Each of the poems are accompanied by a beautiful illustrations done using the technique of etching. The artist puts down color, and then covers it with a black overcoat. Then he (Rick Allen in this case) scrapes away some of the black to reveal the color beneath. It is a good technique for a book about the night.

Finally, each spread had an information paragraph about the subject of the poem. The informational paragraphs are written in prose, but they is well crafted, and almost poem-like. They contain some interesting facts that I had never heard before. The three elements combined--the good poetry, lovely illustrations and interesting information paragraphs--make this probably my top pick of my top five.