Rich Lizard: And Other Poems

Rich Lizard: And Other Poems (1992) is a collection of 24 poems for young readers by Deborah Chandra. The poems center on everyday experiences and things that engage children, such as crickets, soap bubbles, and a lost baby tooth. The volume is illustrated with evocative black and white drawings by Leslie Bowman. Chandra received the IRA Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award in 1995 for Rich Lizard: And Other Poems. The collection was also selected as an NCTE Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Language Arts and an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists.

Chandra’s short, free verse poems do not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, they feature slant rhymes, in which similar but not identical sounds are paired, like “round” and “wand” in the poem “Bubble;” off rhymes, where either vowels or consonants of stressed syllables are identical; and regular hard rhymes. Free verse allows Chandra to use lyrical phrases to portray her whimsical images and create her own poetic structure. She appeals to children’s imaginations, using vivid imagery to make ordinary things extraordinary. In “The Wild Wood,” for instance, two hedges beside a road make a place for a child to disappear and create a secret world of bears and waterfalls.

Rich Lizard: And Other Poems includes many nature and animal poems that capture the essence of their subjects through rich comparisons. In “Cricket,” the speaker likens the insect to a clockwork bug, something wound by springs with a voice like a hinge. Clouds become a “billowing / bunch of sheep.” Warmed by “strange-wild thoughts,” the lizard of the title poem sheds its “skin of silver coins.” In another poem, an ant shares the story of a snail’s secret room. A spider’s bed becomes a tablecloth when a moth stops there to rest in “The Web.” Children camping outside feel the night sky surround them like a sleeping bag. In “The Storm’s Gold,” the speaker envisions miners inside a thundercloud, digging for lightning gold. Their dynamiting becomes the storm’s thunder. A speaker outfoxes a fox in “The Fox,” observing her silently while the fox thinks she is unnoticed.



Chandra also offers poems about concepts that children might encounter and question in their everyday lives. In “Bubble” the speaker is amazed to see their invisible breath take form, becoming a “marble-round” shape inside a soap bubble. The angry words of a man and woman arguing meet as battling insect-like swarms in “The Argument,” but amazingly, leave no physical trace behind. “Porch Light” describes how moths are captured by the light and released when the speaker turns off the switch. In “Day’s End,” the speaker compares the old day to a crumpled newspaper and wonders where it goes.

Familiar objects become remarkable in Chandra’s poetry. Cotton candy is a “sweet tornado.” In the collection’s opening poem, Grandpa’s shoes invite the reader to step inside, where “down past the tough / we’ve worn ourselves soft” with their experiences and travels. A kite describes its journey on the wind and the mysterious, arcane things it has encountered, like “The moon’s white eye, / The smell of storms.” A child sings to a statue when he realizes that the rock lady in the park cannot cry, but also cannot sing in “Statue in the Park.”

Leslie Bowman’s black and white scratchboard illustrations accompany nearly every poem. The bold drawings often extend beyond the boundary of a single page, creating a sense of motion and wide expanse. Horn Book writes that the illustrations “reflect the mood of the poems with empathic intelligence.” Chandra and Bowman previously collaborated in Balloons and Other Poems (1990).