Poet
Valerie Worth
American poet · 1933–1994
Valerie Worth wrote what she called "small poems" — spare, unrhymed miniatures about the most ordinary things imaginable: a safety pin, a dog in the sun, marbles in a hand. Beginning with small poems in 1972, she published a series of these pocket-sized volumes, all illustrated with Natalie Babbitt's fine-lined drawings, gathered eventually as All the Small Poems.
The smallness is deceptive. Each poem looks at its object so patiently that the thing turns strange and shining again — criticism has compared her to William Carlos Williams writing for children. In 1991 she received the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, the field's highest honor.
Her poems are brief enough that quoting even two lines gives much of them away, so we mostly describe rather than excerpt.
Valerie Worth's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
safety pin
Closed, the pin sleeps like something small and silver; opened, it becomes suddenly fish-like, all eye and jab. The poem is a tiny lesson in metaphor — one household object revealed as two different animals. It is probably her most anthologized piece, and a staple of classroom units on seeing the familiar freshly.
sun
Worth renders sunlight as something almost touchable — warmth laid across skin and floorboards like a material you could pick up. The poem demonstrates her core method: no rhyme, no padding, just exact nouns set down in the right order. Children read it and recognize a sensation they had never thought to name.
dog
A dog flops down in the summer grass and the poem settles with him, attentive to lolling tongue and contented weight. Nothing happens, gloriously. It is the rare animal poem with no moral whatsoever — just the pleasure of watching a creature be entirely itself, which turns out to be moral enough.
marbles
Worth looks into marbles the way an astronomer looks into space — small glass globes holding swirls, depths, and cool weight out of all proportion to their size. The poem celebrates the child's instinct that some toys are actually treasures. Like all her best work, it makes richness out of what a pocket can hold.
cow
The cow arrives in the poem as she is: huge, slow, agreeable, magnificently uninterested in being poetic. Worth's flat, precise lines match the animal's own unhurried dignity. It shows her gift extended from the toy box to the pasture without changing method — look long enough, and anything will open.