Shiver Me Timbers!: Pirate Poems & Paintings

Gr 2-5--From the smiling, rollicking kids on the cover laying claim to a beach full of treasure to the shipload of fierce, sneering, plundering, cutlass-waving, face-making buccaneers, boastful of their scurrilous behavior, these pirates are a motley group. In 19 poems, they teach "Pirate Patter" and punishment and describe some less-than-appetizing meals at sea; their penchant for stealing, burying, and sometimes losing track of treasure; and their weapons. To hear them tell it, they're ."..rude, crude dudes with attitudes" who practice growling-"Arrr!"-and ."..love to try to make you cry." "A pirate's life is not for me!" says the young bloke rowing away from the ship under a starry sky. The up- and downsides of life on a pirate ship are evident in Neubecker's bold, colorful, detail-filled cartoonlike illustrations, outlined in India ink. Kids, boys especially, will be charmed by these feisty poems.--Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Heights Public Library, OH

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

In a series of surly pirate-themed poems, Florian (Poem Runs: Baseball Poems) describe the pleasures of life on the high seasa€"avoiding bathing, pillaging towns, and burying treasurea€"with swashbuckler slang sprinkled throughout: "Some pirates pirate spices./ They steal without a care./ Some pirates pirate piratesa€"/ Arrgh, matey, best beware!" It's not all the good life, though, with meals leaving something to be desired ("One Friday we had flounder./ Saturday ate fluke./ If we have fish for one more day/ Methinks that I will puke," complains one scallywag). Florian tosses some unexpected ingredients into the chowder: fearsome Blackbeard diligently writes letters to his mum (she resembles her son, beard and all); on another spread, modern-day children examine the sand where, just below, a skeletal Captain Kidd still guards his treasure ("Been buried here/ Fer many a year/ Since 1669"). With their bloodshot eyes and yellowed teeth, Neubecker's caricatured pirates are appropriately rowdy, rambunctious, and rough around the edges (you can practically smell their feet), the humor complementing the playful say-it-with-a-snarl verse. Ages 6a€"up. Illustrator's agent: Linda Pratt, Wernick & Pratt. (Aug.)

Copyright 2012 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

* "Arr! 'Tis a bonny day indeed when piratical inclinations are recorded with such florid nastiness as that found in this stellar collection of seagoing poems for salty dogs...it's hard to imagine a pirate poetry book half as much fun as the one conjured up here. It helps that along with being amusing, the poems are actually informative as well.... Bouncy verse is ably complemented by Neubecker's pitch-perfect art. His nasty (yet nicely multicultural and including both genders) rovers are always dirty, always wild and clearly having fun on every page. It's not a stretch to say that if Shel Silverstein himself were to have dabbled in the piratical he could not have come up with a better selection of scurvy doggerel than the delicious verses found here."

—Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2012, *STAR