This week: The Moon is a Silver Pond by Sara Cassidy, illustrated by Josée Bisaillon

The board book The Moon is a Silver Pond was a present for my favorite nine month old’s visit this week. We turned the pages together and looked for the cats who have a secondary character/playful presence on almost every page- there’s the grey one, here’s an orange one! Over the next couple years, I predict we will read this book countless times, and spend time together in a world where the Moon is a silver pond, and a hubcap, and a button, and a tooth, among other lovely accessible poetic notions of Moon as a shape-changing every day presence. The Moon in this book is a reliable companion as much as a source of wonder. This is a book for everyone who has called out “Hello!” to the Moon with a child of board book-reading age, and for every child who looks out for the Moon at bedtime, just to be sure.

Board books are hardy and tactile. They’re pretty satisfying as objects—the pages have a great weight and sheen, and all of the spreads open completely flat so no part of the art gets lost in the gutter. Some board books, like this one, also really sing to us and speak to the poets we all are unconsciously when our brains are steeped in learning a language. I love that the Moon metaphors here are things that nurture, mend or comfort.

As wonderful as it is to hear the words of a book sing, all the better when these signifiers are so beautifully and lovingly illustrated by Josée Bisaillon. Her mixed media paintings (maybe gouache, colored pencils, graphite, cutpaper and pen?) give the poem fun and rich narrative possibilities - cats as milk pail interlopers, mending companions and night lights. As a visual narrative, this list poem becomes a story about a child in conversation with the Moon through a day, getting ready for bed and in dream time when a poet would observe the Moon as “A tunnel through the dark night.”