Tag William Grill

Earth Verse

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Earth Verse
Sally M.Walker and William Grill
Walker Studio

The earth is a vast entity orbiting in space: haiku as a poetic form is by nature brief and spare. The combination of the two makes for a truly stunning picture book particularly when the artist is a recent Kate Greenaway medal winner William Grill and the author Sally Walker, a Sibert medal winner some years ago.

The book focuses on Earth’s geological and meteorological aspects beginning with its place in the solar system: ‘third one from the sun. / Earth’s blue and white majesty / dwarfs her lunar child.’

We then move inwards ‘fragile outer crust. / shell around mantle and core – / Earth: a hard-boiled egg.’ How cleverly and succinctly Walker introduces scientific vocabulary into her poetry and you’d find it hard to get more playful than her description of minerals and metals as ‘glittery Earth-bling’;

more beautiful than ‘sediment-filled waves / tumble in a frothy foam … / a gull wears sand socks

or more dramatic than ‘hot-headed mountain / loses its cool, spews ash cloud – / igneous tantrum’.

For each of these small poetic gems, and the others, Grill provides a wonderful atmospheric coloured pencil illustration in his trademark style that is frequently more impressionistic than realistic and never overwhelming the words.
Right in the bottom corner of each spread or sometimes page, is a symbol.: earth, minerals, rocks, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, atmospheric and surface water, glaciers and groundwater. Each of these links to the final section of the book where additional prose information on the nine topics is provided, and there’s also a list of suggested further reading.
This surely is a book to encourage children (and adults) to pause and to wonder at the awesomeness of the world and all its natural beauty.

The Wolves of Currumpaw

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The Wolves of Currumpaw
William Grill
Flying Eye Books
William Grill’s award winning Shackleton’s Journey was an amazing book; but he’s now done something even more sublime with this story which is in part a retelling of a tale from New Mexico – Ernest Thompson Seton’s Lobo, King of Currumpaw – and part research about Ernest Seton.
I’ve long been a huge fan of Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness and in particular Wolf Brother, a fantasy story of a boy and a wolf. Now I’m a fan of another wolf tale too. Here though we have a story of a real wolf, but this is no ordinary wolf; and William Grill welds together fiction and fact, dividing his narrative into six parts starting in 1862 with the impact of the arrival of European settlers in the Old West, and bringing us right up to present time with a mention of David Attenborough and Douglas W.Smith.
Essentially, we learn the story of one particular wolf pack and Lobo its leader and of Seton, their hunter who, after his destructive encounters with the wolves, especially Blanca, Lobo’s mate and Lobo himself, undergoes a redemptive metamorphosis from killer to wild-life protector and conservationist. I have to admit, I shed a tear or two as I read of the placing of Lobo’s dead body beside Blanca’s: “There, you would come to her, now you are together again.”
Sometimes tinged with humour, sometimes with sadness, there is a dreamlike quality about Grill’s drawings, executed in colour pencils. His skill in producing deceptively simple impressionistic interpretations of the wide-open landscapes …

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and big skies of New Mexico …

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is awe-inspiring, whether employed over a double page spread or in his miniature story-telling frames.

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The chilling cruelty of the vast array of vicious iron-tooth traps and other trapping paraphernalia is somehow heightened by his minimalist technique.

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Gripping too is Grill’s narrative voice; here’s an example of his succinct text: ‘Laloche, a French Canadian, believed Lobo was not simply a wolf but a genuine “loup-garou” (werewolf), and therefore could not be caught by ordinary means. He cleverly created his own devious poisons, and used a whole array of spells, charms and incantations, each more elaborate than the last. Day in, day out, he tried and tried, but for all his tricks, Lobo eluded him.’
Seemingly, every time I write a review of a title from this particular publisher, I wax lyrical about the outstanding quality of their books; here’s another example of  production extraordinaire from Flying Eye Books.

Use your local bookshop    localbookshops_NameImage-2

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