A note about Mommy Daddy Evan Sage00

“If you see a vulture, don’t play dead.”

Childhood can be a confusing time, but not to Evan and Sage. They’ve got the world pretty well figured out, and are happy to explain it to their perplexed parents: “A monkey and an ape are not the same,” / said Sage. “The monkey has a longer name.” In this book of funny, fanciful poems and woodcuts, Eric McHenry and Nicholas Garland pay tender tribute to parents and the children who run circles around them.

A note on Eric McHenry

Eric McHenry grew up in Topeka, Kansas and earned degrees from Beloit College and Boston University. His first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser, 2006), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and in 2010 Poetry Northwest awarded him the Theodore Roethke Prize. He is a contributing editor of Columbia magazine and has written about poetry for the New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and Slate. He lives in Topeka with his wife, Sonja, and their two children, Evan and Sage, and teaches creative writing at Washburn University.

A note on Nicholas Garland

Nicholas Garland was born in London in 1935 and from 1947 lived in New Zealand. He returned to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. Later he worked as a Stage Manager at the Royal Court Theatre and directed shows at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club. With Barry Humphries he created the Barry McKenzie strip for Private Eye and quit the theatre to become a political cartoonist. He has also illustrated a number of books, by John Fuller, Wendy Cope, James Fenton and Alex Garland among others. He is married and has four children and six grandchildren.

The poems celebrate quotidian family life, centring on two children – Evan, seven, and Sage, two – and the questions they ask, the theories they have and the unexpected flashes they show of knowing exactly how the world really works, as the above poem demonstrates. The girl’s coy glance out at the reader is a typical Garland flourish, and elsewhere his woodcuts complement the mood of the poetry beautifully.

The Waywiser Press, set up by Philip Hoy in 2002, is an independent publishing company that has brought out a series of quirky titles, handsomely produced and delightfully cheap." – Toby Clements

To see the whole of this review, click on the link below:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8825057/Mommy-Daddy-Evan-Sage-by-Eric-McHenry-review.html