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Marvin Bell, Iowa’s poet laureate, has teamed with illustrator Chris Raschka to produce a playful poem explaining the basic purpose of flags.
A Primer about the Flag opens with the title, and completes the sentence on the next page: “A Primer about the Flag/Or certain ones.” The poem then explains where flags appear, what they might look like and what their purpose is at various locations. For example: “There are Bed and Breakfast flags. They fly over vacancies.”
The nature of the rhyme might suit older children since the poem is not rhyming and visually broken up in the illustrations and mid-sentence on different pages. The cut of each line also has the reader turning the page mid-sentence rather than pausing at the end of each page, as with traditional line cuts, to savor the illustrations. The whole poem does appear at the end of the book for easy reading.
The illustrations are in black-and-white charcoal and ink with mostly white backgrounds. Most of the color comes from the mix of patterns and bright color on the patterns of the flag, which do not represent any particular country. The placement of the words are used to balance the illustrations arranged in various patterns on each page rather than straight sentences aligned at the top or bottom of the page.
Some grownups might not approve of the gun and gun barrel with a little flag that says “Bang” that pops out of it, though the narration for the pages with these illustrations read: “There are little flags that come from the barrel/of a gun/and say BANG.”
A Primer about the Flag is a visually appealing and a nice example of non rhyming poetry suitable for ages 4 and up.
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A Primer about the Flag