Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
Pigmares: Porcine Poems of the silver Screen
Poetry
For ages 7 to 9
Charlesbridge, 2012 ISBN: 978-1580894012
It is nighttime, and a young pig is sitting up in bed watching monster movies on his little TV. After seeing “Dead zombies crawl out from foul-smelling places,” and “Vampire pigs fly from castles at night,” the young pig begins to realize that he should “never watch monsters on film before bed.”
The monsters he is talking about include Frankenswine, a creature that is made up of “pieces and parts.” Feared by others because of his horrific appearance, Frankenswine runs away until he ends up alone and friendless on an Arctic ice floe.
Then there is The Porker from the Black Lagoon, a terrible creature “with scaly claws and slimy snout.” This monster has disgusting habits, and it is terribly crabby to boot. Of course, one does have to consider that “it is hard to grin when every day / there’s water in your shorts.” Perhaps this monster is entitled to spells of bad temper.
The Porker from the Black Lagoon is not the only monster that has to deal with dreadful living conditions. The Abominable Snow Pig lives in a place of perpetual cold, a frozen mountain in Tibet. His food is always cold, as are his hands and feet. Even the logs in his fireplace “are giant ice blocks.”
In this deliciously clever collection of poems, Doug Cushman pays tribute to some of the most famous horror movies of all time, and he does so in a very humorous way. All the monsters in these poems are porcine in nature, and their stories, and the situations they get into, are deliciously funny and silly.
At the back of the book the author gives his readers a little information about the real horror movies that inspired the poems.
