The seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water has had a potent effect on humans who are not physically able to survive, unprotected, in this liquid environment. Throughout the ages, the sea has lured adventurers, dreamers, fishermen, wealthy travelers, and slave traders. Even today, there are people of Southeast Asia who spend most of their lives on the ocean, nomads of the sea. Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea, collected by America’s formidable champion of poetry, Lee Bennet Hopkins, stunningly illustrated by a father-son team of Bob Hansman and Jovan Hansman is a masterful picture book that captures the scope of the influence of the sea on us.
In the current climate of nonstop talk and hyperbole, a dozen poets distill language that speaks volumes, ostensibly to children, but to anyone willing to stop long enough to inhale this 32 page treatise on voyages beginning in the 15th century with Columbus who said, “You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” The 17th century is memorialized with a poem about the first Dutch slave ships and the voyage of the Mayflower. More on slavery in the 18th century; former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, Marilyn Nelson imagines the voice of a victim “Captured by Aliens” from the hold of the ship who says, “I lie curled around terror, facing the blue unknown.” The 19th century Irish immigrants who suffered an Atlantic passage to America to escape the potato famine are contrasted with the 20th century disaster for the wealthy on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Jane Yolen, a master of children’s literature, contributes two contrasting poems about the Jews who tried to escape the holocaust with an ocean journey that starts out full of hope but never reaches a safe haven because so many countries closed their ports to them. Escape from tyranny and the severing of family connections is chronicled in “Carried on Swaying Waves of Hope” as many Cuban refugees braved the 90 miles to Florida in the 1980s and is echoed in a poem about the 2014 Mediterranean refugee crisis.
The back matter of the book has notes on the historical events of each poem and gives a background on each of the stellar poets who contributed to this volume. The value of such poetry is celebrated by the glorious artwork of Bob and Jovan Hansman with a motif that could be interpreted as endless light dancing on water or the vastness of the starry sky above.
Thank you, Lee Bennet Hopkins, for this treasure: Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea.