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DIGGER DOZER DUMPER

Page history last edited by RichiesPicks 10 years, 4 months ago

6 November 2013 DIGGER, DOZER, DUMPER by Hope Vestergaard and David Slonim, ill., Candlewick, August 2013, 32p., ISBN: 978-0-7636-5078-0 

 

"I'm a steamroller, baby

I'm bound to roll all over you"

-- James Taylor, "Steamroller Blues"

 

"DUMP TRUCK

The dump truck doesn't dump his dirt

just anywhere --

he's precise.

He slowly lifts his giant bed

and checks his target twice.

CRASH! BANG! CLANGETY CLANG!

The gravel starts to spill --

a might swoosh, and just like that,

he pours a little hill."

 

Sixteen friendly and hard-working anthropomorphic heavy machines being driven by a trio of kids, accompanied by a dog in a hard hat, illustrate these really great poems about the work of these specialized wheeled or tracked machines.  I really like that it is the kids who are operating these huge, expressive machines and that, in the end -- Surprise! -- we get the reality which is that these kids are actually on their knees playing with toy versions of the same machines and imagining themselves in the real versions.

 

"Trucks that sweep and dig and shift.

Trucks that dump and tow and lift.

Hauling garbage, moving goods,

building houses, clearing woods.

Trucks as far as eyes can see...

 

"Which truck would you like to be?"

 

DIGGER, DOZER, DUMPER sparked my fond memory of Rowena Bastin Bennett's "The Power Shovel (The power digger/Is much bigger/Than the biggest beast I know...), which I have archived in my poetry box and which I mined back in the eighties from the Lee Bennett Hopkins anthology CLICK, RUMBLE, ROAR: POEMS ABOUT MACHINES, which would pair nicely with DIGGER, DOZER, DUMPER.

 

Richie Partington, MLIS
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