4 stars because of the art, and the information on Williams in the back. I loved reading through the timeline of his life. I didn't know anything about him until I read this book, and now I want to look up his poems! ( )

reviewed

Named a Caldecott Honor book for Melissa Sweet's illustrations, A River of Word chronicles the journey of poet William Carlos Williams.

Inspired by the world around him, Williams was drawn to the calm of poetry in the same way he was drawn to poetry. Dissatisfied with the formal poetry he learned in school about topics he was unfamiliar with, Williams wrote free verse poems about the world he observed around him: plums, a wheelbarrow, helping his patients. Although Williams studied and practiced medicine, but he never stopped writing poetry.

**Caldecott Honor Book, Orbis Pictus Award ( )

Author/illustrator team Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet, who subsequently collaborated on A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin and The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus, teamed up for the first time in this lovely picture-book biography of American poet William Carlos Williams. Born and raised in New Jersey, Williams eventually became a doctor, settling in Rutherford. His lifelong love of words, and of poetry, led him to write throughout his life, and he addressed themes and ideas - ordinary objects, the experiences of working class people - previously under-explored in the poetic form. By 1934 he had published thirteen books of poetry, but his work was largely unknown and unacknowledged until the 1940s, when he was in his sixties. In 1963 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer, two months after his death...

I am a great admirer of William Carlos Williams, and have fond memories of the course I took in college devoted to his work. Not only does his poetry speak to me, with its simplicity, and its focus upon the beauty of the ordinary and everyday, but he himself has always struck me as a very admirable person. Although Bryant does mention in her text that Williams served the working class people of Rutherford, often providing his services for free during the Great Depression, she doesn't mention that Williams had the opportunity, as a young man, to become a wealthy society doctor, but opted not to follow that path. It isn't often that I find a figure as admirable a human being, as they are an artist, but Williams is an exception! In any case, I found both text and artwork in A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams appealing, and I loved the way some of Williams' poems were worked into the latter. Melissa Sweet's multimedia collage artwork is well-suited in style, I think, to Williams' words, and I can understand why this title was chosen as a Caldecott Honor book, back in 2009. Highly recommended to all picture-book readers who enjoy biography, poetry, or tales of unusual and admirable people. ( )

The illustrations in this book are amazing! ( )