Ounce Dice Trice

Description

What can words be, or rather, what can't they be? Poet Alastair Reid introduces children and adults to the wondrous waywardness of words in Ounce Dice Trice, a delicious confection and a wildly unexpected exploration of sound and sense and nonsense that is like nothing else. Reid offers light words (willow, whirr, spinnaker) and heavy words (galoshes, mugwump, crumb), words on the move and odd words, words that read both ways and words that read the wrong way around (rezagrats), along with much else. Accompanied by Ben Shahn's glorious drawings, Ounce Dice Trice is a book of endless delights, not to mention the only place where you can fi nd the answer to the question: What is a gongoozler? Well, all I can say is quoz.

Alastair Reid is a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar of Latin American literature. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1959 and has translated works by Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Among his many books for children are A Balloon for a Blunderbuss, I Keep Changing, Millionaires, Supposing, and Ounce Dice Trice (published by the New York Review Children's Collection). In 2008 he published two career-spanning collections of work, Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations and Outside In: Selected Prose. He lives in New York. Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He work has appeared everywhere, from the cover of Time to the walls of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Enough curiosities here to tantalise even the most hardened gongoozler. London Review of Books This mad exporation of words is weirdly addictive and Ben Shahn's etchings make it even more appealing. Junior