osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: barbara cooney

In the process of exploring Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre, I discovered that not one but TWO picture book biographies of Cooney were published in 2024: Angela Burke Kunkel’s World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney and Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World.

The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”

Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.

Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.

Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.

Eugene Field’s poem Wynken, Blynken, and Nod must be catnip for picture book publishers. We had a version published in the 1980s or 90s when I was growing up, and I just recently discovered that Barbara Cooney also illustrated the poem in the 1960s.

Cooney’s illustrations look like white chalk on blue-black paper - some highly textured paper, because she’s worked the texture into the illustrations, so that it’s visible in the sparkle of the moonlight on the water as Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sail their wooden shoe to catch the herring fish that are the stars in the sky.

They are three identical little boys with a soft dandelion fluff of hair, and they sail their shoe back to a tower by the water, where they unload their fish in the shade of the weeping willow. And then - and then - it’s all a dream, for “Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, and Nod is a little head.” They come together to form one baby, asleep in a cradle draped with a sort of half-tester canopy, which is held above the bed by a hook shaped like the head of a heron.

(This detail of the heron-shaped canopy holder particularly enchanted me.)

This is of course a bedtime poem, and the book would work beautifully as a bedtime book: the illustrations are so enchantingly subdued, the black backgrounds spangled with occasional white dots like stars. It would be lovely to slip into the illustrations and sail on the sea of dew.

I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.

The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.

But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.

In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.

I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Miriam Mason’s Yours with Love, Kate, a biography of Kate Douglass Wiggin. I picked this up solely because Barbara Cooney did the illustrations, and lucked into a delightful mid-century biography of the kind that would definitely be published as a novel today, as Mason is 100% making up conversations.

Wiggins seems as boundlessly charming and enthusiastic as one of the heroines of her own novels, only even more extraordinary: a girl born under a lucky star. She meets Charles Dickens in a railway carriage, befriends famous actresses, is invited to act in the company of the famous Dion Boucicault, but decides to stay with the free kindergarten she’s building: this is a time when the kindergarten movement was new and exciting, Wiggins a pioneer in these children’s gardens where children learn through dance and story and song.

She marries Samuel Wiggin, who enthusiastically agrees that women can and should continue to work after marriage, and so continues to work in the kindergarten movement. She starts to write in order to raise money for the kindergartens and becomes one of the most successful children’s authors of her day with The Birds’ Christmas Carol.

I also read Rumer Godden’s Premlata and the Festival of Lights, a slim story about a little girl in India whose family has become so poor that they’ve had to sell the deepas they would usually light to celebrate Diwali. She comes into possession of some money and heads off to the fair to buy new lights, but the fair is full of merry-go-rounds and hot fresh samosas and bangle sellers where she might buy a present for her mother…

What I’m Reading Now

Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, which is about the early years of the impressionist movement and the effect of the Franco-Prussian War on their lives and art when it came crashing into their world. Loving it so far. Especially loving in the bits about Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma (also a painter), but all the information about the social world of the impressionists is fascinating.

What I Plan to Read Next

As you can see, I’ve allowed myself to be distracted from my Newbery readings, but this week I’m hoping to buckle down with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky.

Continuing my Barbara Cooney theme, I read the picture book in which she illustrates ”I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang, a poem by Delmore Schwartz, a mid-century American poet of whom I had never heard. Sorry, Mr. Schwartz.

The little girl is not only cherry alive, she is apple, she is plum, she is pit of peach, (she is deeply opposed to articles), she is red and gold and green and blue. What does this mean? I teetered between finding the poem exhilarating and finding it maddening, in a way makes me think irresistibly of Billy Collins’ poem Introduction to Poetry, in which he encourages his students to experience a poem,

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Okay, Billy! I get it! I need to follow Barbara Cooney’s good example and just vibe with Delmore Schwartz’s little girl who is cherry alive and apple and plum and witch in a zoo, “I will always be me, I will always be new!”

(But also what does it mean to be cherry alive. What does it MEAN.)

Cooney’s illustrations are of course beautiful. I particularly like the ones illustrating the colors, the girl in her red coat and hat watching the red sunrise above the snow, and sitting beneath a golden tree, and crouched on a rock in a green bathing suit by a green pool in a deep green forest.

Picture Book Monday returns! I have decided that I owe it to my little niece and myself to dive back into the picture book world to bring up the pearls for her delectation.

Also, last week was very slow at work, so I decided it was time to add all the books Barbara Cooney has illustrated to my list of books to check out from my libraries. Soon I realized that Barbara Cooney illustrated about a million books (including Felix Salten’s Bambi which I may finally read?), but by then it was far too late to turn back.

So I started with May Garelick’s Down to the Beach, a joyful celebration of, well, summer at the beach. There are boats! hermit crabs! a crab shack! a dog shaking off the ocean water then digging a hole in the sand for a nap! and of course many happy children frolicking and building sand castles.

One of Cooney’s strengths as an illustrator is to build a tiny world that you want to step into: the little beach, the three summer cottages up on the shore, the crab shack on the distant pier, the sailboat with the red-and-white candy-striped sail. A charming escape.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Cooney’s The Little Juggler, which I picked up because I found it shelved next to Susan Cooper’s The Selkie Girl, and I can never resist Barbara Cooney. A charming retelling of an old French story, of a young juggler who was taken in by a monastery, and repined because unlike the monks he had no gifts to offer the Blessed Virgin, until it occurred to him that he might juggle for her.

Cooney’s illustrations are wonderful, as always. In this story, the illustrations are printed in three colors, green and red and blue, and it suggests a medieval flavor, those medieval manuscripts with their rich vibrant colors.

What I’m Reading Now

After firmly intending to begin a book by Ethel Cook Eliot, I started Abbie Farwell Brown’s Friends and Cousins instead. Two children have just returned to their beloved summer vacation cottage, and by happy accident befriended the bashful neighbor children whom they’ve never managed to meet before.

Also working on Women’s Weird (a collection of short stories written between 1880 and 1940, I believe?), Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Fool’s Gold, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Elizabeth Jane Gray’s Meggie MacIntosh, L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon… lots of things!

What I Plan to Read Next

With so many books on the go right now, I really need to finish a few up before I start anything new!

The gift shop at Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst had a picture book about Dickinson, Michael Bedard’s Emily, which of course I absolutely had to buy because it was illustrated by one of my all-time favorite illustrators, Barbara Cooney. So many of her books are about creation and imagination, of course she was the perfect choice to illustrate an Emily Dickinson book.

And indeed she was: her precise yet gently numinous drawings of flowers and landscapes are simply perfect for an Emily Dickinson book. The narrator is a child who lives across the street, and gazes at the house with its mysterious occupant with a brooding fascination, especially once she and her mother are invited to visit. (Not to see Emily, of course, just to play piano and chat with her sister.) So there are many pictures of the house, which you think might get dull, but each rendition is different (I particularly like the one of the house in moonlight, in the snow, and another where the narrator looks through the window at the house), and that repetition really dramatizes the fascination.

And I just really liked the text of the book too, so much that it was hard to choose just one passage to quote. But here is one:

Downstairs, Mother played. Tomorrow she would visit the yellow house. I asked her and she said that I might go. It made me feel afraid.

Perhaps the lady in the yellow house is also afraid, I thought. That is why she hides herself. That is why she runs when strangers call. But why - you cannot say. Maybe people are a mystery, too, sometimes.

***

Next week, we’re getting back to the Caldecott books! Next up is the 1989 winner, Song and Dance Man.

This week's Caldecott book is Chanticleer and the Fox, by one of my all-time favorite author/illustrators, Barbara Cooney! (I have actually posted about two of her books before: Miss Rumphius and Hattie and the Wild Waves.)

Both of those books have softly colored, delicately detailed illustrations, so it was a bit starting to see the big blocks of color in Chanticleer and the Fox, although once I got over the initial startlement I think it works well. The book is an adaptation of a story from Chaucer, and the vivid reds and blues are reminiscent of medieval manuscript illustrations, where even the peasants are smartly dressed in bright colors.

And the black and white pages remind me of woodblock prints - a little later than medieval but also old-fashioned and atmospheric - with their sharp cross-hatching and blocks of pure black. Honestly woodblock prints have always looked super creepy to me, but that actually works well for pages where, say, a fox is creeping through the undergrowth on the hunt for Chanticleer the rooster.

asakiyume sent me a beautiful card with a drawing of a squirrel in a strange little room in a tree, which reminded me so much of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge that I ransacked our old picture book shelves looking for my favorite Brambly Hedge book, The Secret Staircase. Alas, it was nowhere to be found!

But while I was looking for it I found a number of other childhood favorites. Emily Arnold McCully’s Mirette on the High Wire, which I got just a little too late for it to work its way into my DNA - I was too old to demand it read to me hundreds of times - but love nonetheless for tightrope walking and Mirette and France. Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Fair, which means I still find corgis automatically interesting.

And most of all, Roxaboxen, written by Alice McLerran and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. I was not, in my picture book years, aware of such things as favorite authors or illustrators, but if I was, Barbara Cooney would have headed my list. I’ve already posted about Miss Rumphius, who vows to travel to far away places, live by the sea, and make the world more beautiful, and Hattie and the Wild Waves, who grows up to become an artist.

Creation - making pictures, making the world more beautiful - is central to Cooney’s books, and central as well to Roxaboxen. But Roxaboxen is not about pictures or flowers or things you can hold in your hand, but a group of friends who create an imaginary town: Roxaboxen, which grows out of the greasewood and thorny ocotillo of a desert across the road.

The desert is mostly full of broken crates and bits of white stone, and the kids gather up this seeming junk and make their imaginary town out of it: stones lining the streets, crates for bits of furniture. Frances branches out into desert glass, old broken bottles that become, in her mind, “amber, amethyst, and sea green: a house of jewels.”

Eventually, of course, they all grow up and go away and leave Roxaboxen behind to slowly melt back into the desert. But that’s not the end of things: “Because none of them ever forgot Roxaboxen. Not one of them ever forgot.” The echoes of stories in life - this is one of my favorite things.

One of the Roxaboxenites told the story to her daughter, Alice McClerran; and McClerran wrote Roxaboxen; and the hill in Yuma where Roxaboxen was, is now preserved forever by the Friends of Roxaboxen.

Barbara Cooney’s Hattie and the Wild Waves might also be called Portrait of the Artist as a Little Girl, and as such I identified excessively with the heroine, Hattie. I dreamed of being a writer, not a painter - I don’t know when I first dreamed it, but it was a fixed star in my mind by second grade - but the common creative urge was there.

Plus, her family went to a summer house on Far Rockaway. Could a name be more redolent of magic than Far Rockaway? The seaside scenes were my favorites in the book, along with Hattie painting the black swans from China.

Hattie is your typical tomboy heroine with an artistic twist. She loves to stand in the prow of her father’s boat, where “the moist salt breezes took all the curl out of her hair.” She hates standing for fittings, can’t sew worth a lick, and yearns to be an artist, in contrast her older sister Pfiffi, who loves getting new dresses and dreams of being a beautiful bride.

Plus, she’s named Pfiffi. It’s a very tiny-yappy-Pomeranian name.

I’ve always wondered what really girly pink-fluff-and-glitter girls read, because there aren’t many books that I can recall in which girly girls are main character. If they’re in the book at all, they’re a sister or cousin or a friend who acts as either an antagonist or a foil for the heroine - to show what a tomboy she is, because “boyish” is obviously the most flattering adjective that could possible be applied to a girl.

I don’t, I hasten to add, mean to be unduly harsh on my beloved Hattie and the Wild Waves. Pfiffi is never vilified for her more traditional femininity, and her character is necessary to show the gulf between the kind of femininity society expected and the artist Hattie wanted to be. But it is a pattern that shows up time and again, and it is unfair to more traditional feminine girls.

I'm jumping on the 100 Things Challenge bandwagon! A little late, as usual, but I just came up with a topic: 100 Books that Influenced Me, starting with books from my childhood and going on up.

This morning I was dispatched to get a picture book to read to the kindergartners. Naturally, I started thinking of old favorites to share. Should I get something by Jan Brett? But my favorite book of hers is The Wild Christmas Reindeer, and it's nowhere near Christmas time. Patricia Polacco? It's raining outside today - perfect weather for Thunder Cake...

And then inspiration struck! I got Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, which is about a girl who decides to do three things when she grows up: to go to faraway places, to come home to live by the see, and to make the world more beautiful. And then Miss Rumphius grows up, travels to faraway places, gets a little house by the sea, and sows lupines across the land so that she becomes the Lupine Lady.

I love the completeness of it: wanting these things, and doing them all, one by one. And I love Miss Rumphius's goals so much that they've become mine. I too want to travel to faraway place, live by the sea (or a lake, or a stream, or a forest; something natural and beautiful), and make the world more beautiful.

Mind, I would probably still want these things if my mom hadn't read me Miss Rumphius at an early age. But I don't think the purpose of books is to change who we are. It's to show us who we are: to uncover new facets of our characters and nourish neglected corners of our souls. Books help us become our best selves.

ETA: I ran out of steam on this halfway through, so I'm calling it a day at 50 books. Fifty is still a lot of books!

Because of the impending holiday, I've been giving books to my students left and right this week. (What do you mean, Thanksgiving isn't a gift-giving holiday? All holidays are for gift-giving. I fully intend to inflict books on my students for St. Patrick's Day.)

As I've found a place where I can buy them for fifty cents, I've started a small stock of picture books for my first graders. My favorite first grader picked Roxaboxen! Has anyone else read Roxaboxen? It's about a bunch of kids who build an imaginary town in the desert using white stones and desert glass - "amethyst, amber, and sea-green." I looooooved it when I was a little kid.

My student seemed to find it a little puzzling when I read it to her, but no doubt she'll grow to love it over time.

I also have Miss Rumphius, which we always called The Lupine Lady because it's about Miss Rumphius wandering the countryside spreading lupine seeds to make the world more beautiful. Best book EVER!

Picture books! They don’t get enough LJ-love, probably because most Ljers quit reading them regularly fifteen years ago. But – these are the books that form the mulch of our minds. They’re the dark, peaty soil that nourishes our imaginations! From picture books flowers a love of literature, an appreciation of art, an adoration of alliteration, quick someone give me another word beginning with A...

Anyway! I spent the weekend at home for a wedding, and when not occupied with wedding related things I reread my old picture books.

Picture books – or at least my favorites – are all prose-poems The alliteration! (Someday I should read Gawain and the Green Knight. The idea of alliteration makes my heart palpitate.) The refrains! The delicious words! In one of my favorites, The Mousehole Cat they eat star-gazy pie. I have no idea what it is, but just hearing it evokes a sense of wonder and comfort and “Mom, can you read this to me again and again and again and again and – ”

My poor parents.

Other favorites: Jan Brett’s The Christmas Reindeer, which has the most beautiful, rich, detailed pictures, bordered with illustrations of Santa’s workshop.

Patricia Polacco’s Thunder Cake, about a girl who bakes a cake with her grandmother as a thunderstorm brews. I was so afraid of thunderstorms then, and that book helped soften the fear.

And two books by Barbara Cooney. Roxaboxen, about a cadre of kids living in the desert build an imaginary city out of white stones and desert glass: turquoise, amethyst, and sea green; and Miss Rumphius, which everyone I know calls The Lupine Lady. (I had a friend once who found a bench in a garden dedicated to Miss Rumphius. I thought that was pretty ace.)

Anyway, the Lupine Lady walks around the east coast scattering lupines like a floral Johnny Appleseed. I adored that book. I still love that book; I want to be the lupine lady, at least metaphorically. My LJ is in some ways an extension of that side of myself.

Did anyone else read any of these?

***

In other news, a trio of flies invaded the cabin while I was at the wedding. I squashed two of them, but they popped back up and fluttered off like cartoon characters, so I’ve given up and given them names: Vanya, Tanya, and Alexei Grigorovich. They’re either White émigrés or turnstile-hopping Brezhnev era chess players, and they want my bananas.

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Page Summary

Picture Book Monday: World More Beautiful and Because Barbara
Book Review: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Picture Book Monday: A White Heron
Wednesday Reading Meme
Picture Book Monday: “I Am Cherry Alive,” The Little Girl Sang
Picture Book Monday: Down to the Beach
Wednesday Reading Meme
Picture Book Monday: Emily
Caldecott Monday: Chanticleer and the Fox
100 Books, #31: Roxaboxen
100 Books, #3: Hattie and the Wild Waves
100 Books that Influenced Me: Miss Rumphius
Roxaboxen
In Praise of Picture Books

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: barbara cooney

Picture Book Monday: World More Beautiful and Because Barbara

Book Review: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

Picture Book Monday: A White Heron

Wednesday Reading Meme

Picture Book Monday: “I Am Cherry Alive,” The Little Girl Sang

Picture Book Monday: Down to the Beach

Wednesday Reading Meme

Picture Book Monday: Emily

Caldecott Monday: Chanticleer and the Fox

100 Books, #31: Roxaboxen

100 Books, #3: Hattie and the Wild Waves

100 Books that Influenced Me: Miss Rumphius

Roxaboxen

In Praise of Picture Books