Building Poems Student Book: Second Edition

Building Poems uses architecture as an extended metaphor, showing that poems are constructed like buildings, with careful attention to every detail. Like the metaphor itself, the book is constructed so that it beautifully illustrates the points made by reinforcing them visually.

This book takes the same basic topics that were introduced in The Music of the Hemispheres and expands upon them, adding new elements. It includes alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye rhyme, poetic feet, iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls, spondees, sonnets, ballads, rime royal, limericks, similes, metaphors, personification, apostrophe, and end stopped versus enjambed lines.

These elements are exhibited in the poems of famous poets such as Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Henry Longfellow, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Shakespeare, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as original works by Michael himself. The book enables students to understand and appreciate poetry at a far higher level than is typical for children in this age group.

As a special feature, this book contains QR codes that link to audio of Michael reading the poems.