MULTICULTURAL POET

Mora, Pat. Dizzy In Your Eyes: Poems About Love. New York. Random House Children’s Books. 2012.

ISBN: 978-0-375-94565-6

Dizzy In Your Eyes: Poems About Love by Pat Mora is a book of poetry for young adults. As the title suggests, the poems in the book are about love. The book covers everything from romantic love, to familial love, to love for friends and teachers. Anyone who has ever known the stirrings of first love during their teenage years or the other types of love in the book will relate to these poems.

Written in a variety of poetic forms such as free verse, haiku, sestina, couplet and others, Mora has found a way for the reader to experience a myriad of emotions. In the poem, “Doubts,” she covers the questions we ask ourselves such as “What if guys think I can’t kiss because I can think?” or “What if I ask her out and she laughs?” In her poem “Pressure,” she deals with peer pressure and the age old line “If you love me, trust me.” In “Valentine to Papi,” we read of the love between a father and daughter in the reminiscing of their first dance. This book will truly run the reader through a gamut of emotions while poems such as “Conversation/Conversación” and “Mundo de aqua” will appeal to the bilingual reader.

Mora has grouped the poems in the book to represent the cycle of emotions that love brings. She begins with the poems about the beginning of love then transitions to the heartache and pain of love. She follows this with poems of healing and solace and then those which deal with falling in love again. The book has a table of contents and page numbers. One aspect of the book that I find interesting to note was the explanations of the poetic forms used in the poems. Mora provides a pronunciation guide for the various forms used and a definition that is clear and concise on the page before the poem. This is a valuable resource for teachers looking to use this in a classroom setting.

SPOTLIGHT POEM

There are so many poems to choose from in this book that is hard to spotlight just one. One I would definitely spotlight, however, is “FOUR-LETTER WORD.”

FOUR-LETTER WORD

By Pat Mora

Like breathing, I started when I was born,

            started loving. I didn’t know its name.

            but I knew pleasures: eating, warmth.

One day, like a flash of lightning, I linked

            the four letters, the feeling , with the word.

            The word was never the same.

Very soon, I could list loves galore;

            sunshine, Mom’s smile, Dad’s laugh, our house,

            my bed, jeans, friends; the taste of peppermint,

            music that lifted me soaring off the floor.

Ever since I met you, the word, the same four letters

            became a private place

            your face takes me,

            ours the only keys

            to the invisible door.

This particular poem is an acrostic which means that the first letter of each line spells a word or name. The word spelled is the subject of the poem. After introducing the poem and reading it several times, I would ask the students for other words which a poem like this could be written around. As a group, we would brainstorm each word given and maybe write one together. The students could then write their own acrostic poem with the word of their choice.