The Cricket Who Croaked Like A Frog

Crickets do not normally croak like frogs—they sing. But Chirpy has a great desire to sound like the frogs he so admires and sets forth a plan to befriend the pond frogs in order to be taught just how to make the sounds he loves to hear at night. This will require a bit of work for Chirpy and the frogs. Can they do it? Read The Cricket Who Croaked Like a Frog to find out!

Everyone will be closely acquainted with a few people who have synesthesia but you may not yet know who they are because, until very recently, it was largely hidden and unknown. Now science is uncovering its secrets and the findings are leading to a radical rethink about how our senses are organized.

No other nonhuman source has served as the basis for more metaphors than animals. Speaking of Animals is a dictionary of animal metaphors that are current in American English. It is comprehensive, historical, and metaphor-based. Each entry refers to the other dictionaries that catalog that same metaphor, and the dates of first appearance in writing are supplied, where possible, for both the metaphor and the name of the source. The main text is organized alphabetically by metaphor rather than by animal or animal behavior; all the metaphors are classified according to their animal source in a list at the end of the book. An animal metaphor is a word, phrase, or sentence that expresses a resemblance or similarity between someone or something and a particular animal or animal class. True metaphors are single words, such as the noun tiger, the verb hog, and the adjective chicken. Phrasal metaphors combine true metaphors with other words, such as blind tiger, hog the road, and chicken colonel. Other animal metaphors take the form of similes, such as like rats leaving a sinking ship and prickly as a hedgehog. Still others take the form of proverbs, such as Don't count your chickens before they hatch and Let sleeping dogs lie. The horse is the animal most frequently referred to in metaphors, followed closely by the dog. The Bible is the most prolific literary source of animal metaphors, followed closely by Shakespeare.

John Thieme here provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginnings in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts--Caribbean, European and other--that have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for students and readers coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time.

Ti-Jean and his Brothers was Derek Walcott's first venture into musical plays and is still his most popular work. A lilting St Lucian folk-tale, it tells the story of a poor family who dwell on the edge of a magical forest haunted by the devil's spirits. The brilliance of Walcott's writing draws us into the realms of fantasy where the actual and the miraculous collide. Dennis Scott's An Echo in the Bone is set during a traditional Nine-Night Ceremony held to honour the spirit of the dead. Shattering sequential time in a series of dreamlike episodes the play takes us back to the time of plantations and slavery - and the savage murder of the white estate owner. Who killed Mr. Charles? The answers lie deep in the racial memory, they 'echo in the bone'. The giddy atmosphere of carnival is the setting for Errol Hill's Man Better Man, a rumbustious, colourful comedy musical about stickfighters. With dance and song the battling troubadours and the calypsonian weave a tale of braver, superstition and fraudulence. When first performed the Times described it as 'a blazing electrifying feast of rhythm and colour'.