Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea

Hopkins, Lee Bennett (Editor). Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea
ILlustrated by Hansman, Bob and Hansman, Jovan.
October 17th 2017 by Seagrass Press
Copy provided by The Quarto Group

This illustrated collection of eleven poems covers the topic of immigration or travel on the water through US history. The illustrations incorporate period drawings into collage type tableaux that use shades of blue and images of bubbles to good effect. The poems are historically arranged and are by authors as diverse as Hopkins to my favorite, Naomi Shahib Nye. An afterword gives further historical detail on each of the poems' settings. While I'm not sure that younger students would get much out of the poems by themselves, since they are emotionally and situationally complex, they would be a good starting point for conversations about the role sea travel played and continues to play in the movement of people around the world.

It is increasingly difficult to find collections of poetry that work well for a yearly assignment of our language arts teachers gives her students, and this is a good, but short, collection of well done poems.