Mirror Mirror (poetry)

Mirror, Mirror

By: Marilyn Singer

This book is a series of poems about famous fairytales, as interpretted by the author. The poems are actually 2 poems in one. The poem is read one way going down and then changed on the next page to read it the other way, like a mirror image, so the poem is reversed. There are 14 poems, the first and last are an introductory poem about the reverse, and an exit poem about the road. The poems include: In Reverse, In the Hood, Cinderella, The Ssleeping beauty and the Wide Awake Prince, Rapunzel's Locks, The Doubtful Duckling, Full of Beans (Jack and the Beanstalk), Bears in teh News (Goldilocks), Have Another Chocolate (Hansel and Gretel), Do you Know my Name (Rupelstiltzskin), Dissappointment (The Princess and the Frog), Longing For Beauty (Beauty and the Beast), and the Road.

This genre of this book is poetry. It was published in 2010. I can't even tell you how much I loved this book, it is so engaging for the readers that it reverses the poems. I can't wait to read this book to my students, because I really feel that this is a wonderful idea to help keep poetry relevant for young readers. The techniques used are rhyme, repetition, and rhythm. It repeats the stanzas in the seond part of the poem, to make a different meaning of the verses. I can't explain well enough to do this justice, I really feel this should be read. The reoccuring pattern in that it reverses the original poem, and it rhymes. The structure used is verse novels, because as the book states "tells stories through poetry but...consist of a series of one- or two- page poems rather than a single long poem (Galda,2010)."

The illustrations used are beautiful, and immitate the text structure...what I mean by that is that it is a mirror image, but opposite or in reverse. One side will be, for example, mainly blue with green accents, and the other mainly green with blue accents (these are the sleeping beauty pages) The technique and media used are, I believe acrylics, and they used bright vivid colors. I also think that the artist uses surrealism, because  mixed with impressionistic art. It is very dreamlike, but emphasizes the color differences in each story. It really does add to the story, for the simple reason that it shows the reversal in the pages, the texts, and the images. Images should tell the story, right along with the story, and this book, as a whole, is beautifully told.

Some ideas to incorporate this book into classroom activities would be, first, to maybe make up a poem for the entire class. Start of by picking a topic to concentrate on, like the being happy, and make up the first stanza for the class. Something like It makes me so happy that I am here with all of you. Then have the students add to the poem, ryhming would probably be the best technique, but this allows them to be creative in their learning process. Aanother idea would be, for this particular book, to make a book of images based on only the titles of each poem, without hearing the poems, yet. This allows them to think about what story  the title may have to do with (since some of them are not what I would have thought).

Resources:

Galda, L., Cullinan, B. E., & Sipe, L. R. (2010). Literature and the child (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworths, Inc.

Singer, M. (2010). Mirror, Mirror. New York. Dutton.