How extraordinary that the only poetry collection devoted to the trials
and tribulations of an entire class of sixth graders is written by the
eighty-five-year-old MacArthur Grant and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Richard Howard!
Although loosely based on the poet's own progressive education in
Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1940s, the poems are set mostly in the present
day.
Richard Howard is a poet of personality, of history, and of a
sensibility rooted in knowledge. In his fifteenth collection, Howard
captivates the reader as he and the class grapple with science and
literature, teacher and principal, and the hard facts and comic fancies
of life itself.