Snake Poems

These poems are very powerful, and I appreciate the additional information provided in the front and the back of this book. After reading this book my heart ached, because I wish there was someway I could help this environment. I think it might make a good project for students to become involved in their community, or to find ways of improving local and global environments.

This book of poems offers a great way for many children of different walks of life to be included. These poems also open up discussion about different habitats and nature in ways that can expand on students’ knowledge of Hispanic culture. The illustrations are bright, captivating, and incredibly detailed and realistic.

I like the colorful illustrations that go with these simplistic poems. I also like that the poems are in Spanish and English, which students would enjoy too. There is variety in the poems, some with higher vocabulary or more details then others. This book of poems would connect in well with a rain forest study and I think it would fun to research more about the Guarani people when sharing this book with a class.

The author writes the poems in both English and Spanish which is representative of who he is (duel citizen, bi-lingual, bi-cultural) which makes this book unique in that it serves both language speakers and unwittingly serves each to understand the other.

Volume of mostly short, simple, but enjoyable and memorable (if sometimes a tad over-earnest) poems, interspersed with ‘chants, spells and invocations’ in Nahuatl, (with verse translations in English), drawn from a treatise compiled in mid-17th-Century New Spain by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, sections of whose Spanish commentary are also quoted, again, with English translations, making for a rich trilingual mixture.

Terrific for parents and other educators. My children are grown, though, and my inner child didn't want to come out for this. Try it on openlibrary.org if your library doesn't have it.

From the back cover:
Snake Poems, by award-winning poet Francisco X. Alarcon, represents the first time a contemporary writer has returned to the Aztec heritage, empowering himself not only as a translator and commentator but as a medium in the tradition of the poet as a shaman.....Alarcon has composed a unique, tri-lingual work that combines parts of Ruiz de Alarcon's Spanish treatise, original Nahuatl incantations, and Alarcon's poems in English. Alarcon's sparse yet evocative style reveals the depth and endurance of an ancestral world view and its significance to the renewed consciousness of contemporary indigenous peoples."

For anyone interested in the Aztec people or in the poetry of chants, spells, and invocations of indian show more peoples--or, simply in ancient cultures, this is a worthwhile and fascinating view into an often forgotten people. Recommended. show less