The 2011 winner of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award is: The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane by C.M. Millen, illustrated by Andrea Wisnewski (Charlesbridge, 2010). “This annual award goes to the best book of children’s poetry published in the United States in the preceding year. It is co-sponsored with Lee Bennett Hopkins himself along with the University Libraries, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and additional sponsor, Pennsylvania School Librarians Association.”

What a lovely book celebrating the art and the poetry of the humble medieval monks who gave us beautiful illuminated manuscripts of the Bible and other Christian texts and also scribbled little bits of phlosophy and poetry in the margins and on spare bits of parchment. Mr. Millen has taken these monkish poems and used them as inspiration for a story poem about a monk named Brother Theophane who “would stop with his copying chore to write all about the beauty outdoors” and who “tended his field, harvesting plants for the colors they yield.”

Andrea Wisnewski is a gardener herself, and it shows in her illustrations which combine a love for nature and for colorful illumination with a Celtic medieval feel to it. I could spend a great deal of time looking at the illuminated lettering and the vines and plants entwined through the margins of the pictures. Books like this one are what convince me that the ebook revolution has a ways yet to go before it will be an improvement on the old-fashioned picture book. Whoever invented the book with pages did a fine thing.

The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane would be a good addition to any homeschool study of the Middle Ages and a brilliant entryway into discussion of Irish monks, monastery life, manuscript illumination, and medieval poetry. Also in the back of the book are these links to ehlpful websites that could extend the study:

To learn how to make your own hawthorn bark ink.
To experiment with extracting colors from plants.
To learn how illuminated manuscripts were made.