Though an established classic, The Snowy Day has received renewed attention from the We Need Diverse Books movement, and Pinkney’s poem sheds fascinating light on Keats’s long-lived achievement. Pinkney describes the snow of Peter’s day as “nature’s we-all blanket,” an inclusive force (“When Snow spreads her sheet, we all glisten”), while Fancher and Johnson ( Shh! Bears Sleeping) mime Keats’s collages, creating a gentle ambience for Pinkney’s wordplay and confident voice. Who is “filled with brown-sugar whimsy,” developed from a series of photos of a child that Keats clipped from a 1930s Life magazine. After his service as a draftsman in the WWII Air Force, “Ezra did something many Jews did/ when the want ads said:/ ‘No Jews Need Apply’ ” and changed his name to one that “had a nicer ring to it-for some.” Pinkney emphasizes that “Discrimination had formed Ezra’s/ understanding of what it meant to be/ different./ This also led to you, brown-sugar boy.” The character of Peter, warmly addressed as a “cocoa sprite” This formidable biographical poem pays homage to Ezra Jack Keats while speaking to Peter, the fictional African-American hero of The Snowy Day, the story of a black boy playing in the snow, remarkable among 1960s children’s stories in which “the delight/ was all white.” Pinkney ( Rhythm Ride) goes deeply into Keats’s motivations, describing how “Jacob (Jack) Ezra Katz,” a child of struggling Polish immigrants, progressed from grocery store sign painter in Brooklyn to WPA muralist to comic book artist.
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