Sara Holly Ackerman's plain-spoken, simple picture book biography Woods & Words: The Story of Poet Mary Oliver gives young readers an approachable account of the life of a writer who drew inspiration from nature.
Ackerman (Challah for Shabbat Tonight) outlines Oliver's life while always keeping the emphasis on the poet's art. As a child, Oliver would escape the indoors to sit "in clusters of coltsfoot and violets" and fill "stacks of notebooks" with her poems. Her first job out of high school was at Steepletop, famed poet Edna St. Vincent Millay's house, where Oliver lived and met her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook. All the while, Oliver "wrapped herself in woods and words." Some of Oliver's "poems appeared/ in magazines./ Others were bound and sold in/ the bookshop Molly opened." Oliver eventually won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, despite many editors believing she was "ordinary" and "humdrum."
The text's language is down-to-earth, mimicking Oliver's belief that "poems were for everyone,/ best served plain." A humorous example: when Mary won "the biggest poetry prize," she hung up the phone then "went to the dump./ Prize or no prize, her roof needed shingles." Naoko Stoop's multimedia illustrations show the quotidian words Oliver collected swirling around her; others focus on the natural world with which Oliver surrounded herself. A one-page biography in the backmatter augments this clean, spare picture book. Ackerman and Stoop (Sun and Moon Have a Tea Party) have combined their talents to show how simple words and experiences can speak to all kinds of people. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer