Out of this World
Review by Dr. Jerry Flack
haiku syllables
soar beyond Earth’s atmosphere
journey to the stars
Award-winning author, Sally M. Walker, employs one of the most widely known and used verse forms to take students on a poetic trip into space, near and far, far away. Further, she devotes a large part of Out of This World to an exploration of space using informative prose to help gifted readers further explore and better understand the extraordinary space phenomena initially introduced in her haiku poems. Walker’s subject matter highlights constellations, astronomers, the universe, stars, the sun and its planets as well as added subjects such as moons, eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteors. Each of her subjects is introduced with a haiku poem.
Haiku is a three-line verse form that originated in Japan centuries ago. The complete poem is written in three lines that total 17 syllables. There are five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five again in the final line. Historically, haiku has been written about nature and seasons of the year. Early haiku was written in Japan as a single line and often served as the introduction to a longer poem. Poets from England and the U.S.A. began adopting the verse form in the late 19th-century and broadened the subject matter to address a myriad of subjects. Because the format is easy for students to comprehend and utilize, haiku is a good introduction to model verse formats.
Walker opens her poetic space tour with a tribute to constellations:
three stars in a row
Orion fastens his belt
ready for the hunt
The complementary illustration, rendered in deep blues and greens, reveals the constellation of Orion in its full glory of dramatic white stars.
Walker’s haiku celestial celebrations are superimposed on dynamic double-page, full-bleed artistic spreads. “Milky Way” is one such example.
gaudy Milky Way
spiral arms blossom outward
galactic pinwheel
Illustrator Trueman’s glorious accompanying artwork features seemingly endless stars in a dazzling array of circles and swirls. His spectacular mixed-media and color-saturated paintings veer toward impressionism, but never to the point that the reality of any space element is unrecognizable. He is especially successful in using brilliant bursts of orange and yellow to underscore fiery space bodies and cool blue and dark green hues with black accents to complement dark planets and deep space.
Walker is not afraid to include touches of sly humor in her tributes to celestial bodies. One example is her haiku celebration of Saturn.
rings of rock and dust
circle around Saturn’s waist
cosmic Hula-Hoops
Out of This World is presented in what appears to be two books combined together as one entity. The book is principally a space science-verse-artistic book that will especially appeal to young gifted readers. Walker’s narrative end matter, however, is particularly thorough and may well appeal to middle or secondary talented learners. In considerable detail, the factual notes at the end of the book explain and define the subjects she initially celebrates in verse.
In her astronomy primer, Walker begins with an introduction to constellations and astronomers. She defines constellations as “large, easily recognized star patterns,” and further notes that for more than 30,000 years humans have noted them on bones, cave walls, clay, and parchment. People of antiquity “connected the ‘star dots’ to form sky pictures.” Primitive images have visualized mythology from early cultures. An ancient Greek tale notes the three aligned stars that symbolize the belt of Orion the hunter.
Walker’s descriptions of the planets that are Earth’s nearest neighbors feature the average distance of planets from the sun, their diameter, orbit around the sun (in Earth minutes, hours, days, and years) and revolutions (one day-and-night cycle). Readers learn that Saturn’s orbit around the sun is 29 Earth years. Its revolution is 10 hours and 40 minutes. In his discovery of Saturn, astronomer Galileo Galilei did not know the reason for Saturn’s distinctive rings.
Young readers will enjoy the verse and art found in Out of This World. More advanced readers will additionally discover both basic and new facts about astronomy. The fusion of space science, verse, and art is a dazzling tribute to celestial entities.
Home and School Activities
Galileo Galilei is described by Walker as a sleuth, yet his telescope was not powerful enough to explore and understand the rings of Saturn. Invite youths to compose haiku verses that further explore this planetary phenomenon. Creative readers can also write a prose explanation of Saturn’s rings and add an illustration to complete an astronomical “biography” of the planet.
Use online resources (many found in the back matter of the book) to explore space to an even greater degree than Walker does. The universe is so immense that standard Earth measurements such as miles or kilometers are unrealistic. Rather, astronomers measure distances in space in light-years. Prompt students to read the poet’s narrative explanations in the book’s back matter and list some of the most vital numbers used to conceptualize the vast expanses of the cosmos. For example, the speed of a single light-year equals 5.9 trillion years. The largest star in the known universe, UY Scuti, is a mere 9,500 light-years from Earth. Suggest to gifted readers to use the haiku format to spotlight phenomenal numbers cited in Out of This World.
Galileo Galilei is the single human being named in either the haiku or the narrative end matter. Ask gifted readers to use the resources in Sally M. Walker’s mini-astronomy lessons plus the books she recommends to locate the names of other human beings who have made significant contributions to space science. For example, can gifted poets write an ode or a haiku to honor astronaut Sally Ride?
Ask gifted explorers to examine terms in the glossary found in the back matter of Out of This World. Examples might include eclipse, nebula, or plasma. Young researchers may investigate such celestial phenomena and then write both a haiku tribute and a prose definition of their chosen term and add a dramatic illustration.
Expand the verse tribute to space phenomena with other short verse forms. Help children find the link to “Poetry Is Delicious” in Home and School Activities. In that article numerous poetry forms such as cinquain and acrostic verse are shared. Use any of these additional verse forms to celebrate any celestial entity in the known universe. One example might be to compose an “I Am” poem that also adds the literary device of personification in order to allow Pluto to write about being down-graded from a planet to being labeled a dwarf star, an action that occurred in 2006.
Sally M. Walker uses both haiku and prose information to write about comets, yet she does not highlight the most famous comet that circles the planet Earth every 75 years. Invite gifted readers to research Halley’s Comet. What famous American author predicted that his life span would exactly equal two Halley’s Comet Earthly visits (one at the beginning and one at the ending of his life)? (Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain).
