People who are contented and stable don’t tend to feel the need for poetry. It’s at the hinge stages of our lives – the language acquisiton heyday of early childhood, the minefield of adolescence, and the subsequent walk through pain and joy – that we come to places where only a poem will do. Two new offerings from Kids Can Press explore the potential of poetry for young adults, a group that’s ripe for this form’s intensity, distillation, and ability to ask big questions.

Dionne Brand’s Earth Magic, a 20-poem collection originally published in 1979, has been reissued with new paintings by Eugenie Fernandes. Brand – a poet, novelist, academic, and social activist – seems to be one of those writers for adults who access a sunny, joyful writing self when they turn their attention to a young audience. The poems here, set in the West Indies, deal with elemental things: times of the day, days of the week, weather. Against this backdrop we catch glimpses of people who could be from nursery rhymes – the old woman, the fisherman, the bottleman, the dancing girl. Some of the poems celebrate their origins in movement and children’s folk culture. The middle stanza of “Skipping Rope Song” investigates ambition: “Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper,/I wanna be great,/ a hot shot lawyer,/a famous dancer,/a tough operator,/Salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper.” “Morning” is a lovely introduction to the device of personification: “Day came in/on an old brown bus/with two friends.” Several of the poems deal with the growing social consciousness of the young. “Slave Ship” begins with a repetition that turns the word ship into a curse – “an iron ship/a long cruel ship, a ship rivetted/to an evil course.”

The poems form a cohesive whole because they deal in a limited number of elements rearranged for different effects: fisherman, goat, sun, washing line, fish, boat, wave. The shuffle-and-deal feeling of the collection is emphasized by the illustrations, in which these pictorial elements appear and reappear in vibrant landscapes of magic realism. Fernandes uses a particularly pleasing curving line for hill, sun, moon, laundry line, and many versions of large, round women. She is also instrumental in creating an overall effect of sunny, jazzy, joyous energy.
Back in 1979, Earth Magic was a slim paperback with black-and-white cross-hatched drawings by Roy Crosse. The whole thing was more earnest and sombre. The earlier edition does give the reader greater room for individual interpretation. But that was then, this is now, and now we need colour, and this reviewer just needs to get over it. The chance for a whole new generation of readers to encounter these poems in a snazzy hardcover presentation, one that befits the 21st century, is to be applauded.

Poetry can make you look at the world anew. I was reminded of this by Casey at the Bat, by Ernest L. Thayer, the fourth in Kids Can’s Visions in Poetry series of classic poems repackaged. Morse has taken what is essentially a piece of parlour poetry and recast it as a tough, dangerous, inner-city riff. At first this seemed absurd. Baseball is not about razor wire and graffiti. Baseball is about the smell of hot dogs and the quest to get home. But then I actually read the words of the poem.

From the benches, black with people,
There went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves
On a stern and distant shore:
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!”
Shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him
Had not Casey raised his hand.

What happens if you read this not as jolly hyperbole but as a real report of racial tension? What if you read “pall-like silence” and “deep despair” with an aggressive, hammering, trochaic rhythm rather than in the traditional dance-along cadence? What you end up with is the possibility of a vision like Morse’s, an unironic, bleak world of violence and muscle played out in a limited palette of grey and white with touches of red. This is a world of fists, sweat, blood, sneers, gangs, and very baggy pants. All the characters are what Brand’s skipping rhyme calls “tough operators.” It is all eerily apt. But does it work? To me, it felt more like a tour de force than a cohesive narrative creation.

Earth Magic and Casey at the Bat open two windows on to the experience of youth – one Trinidadian, rural, and female, and the other American, urban, and male. I found Brand’s creation more convincing and rooted. But maybe I just couldn’t stop hoping for hot dogs.