A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson

Nelson, Marilyn.
Illustrated by Philippe Lardy.
A Wreath for Emmett Till.
Houghton Mifflin
Company: Boston, 2005.

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago that was severely beaten and lynched while visiting family in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1955. Witness accounts state at least two white men brutally mutilated and beat the boy, eventually killing him and discarding the body in the Tallahatchie River. Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett’s mother, had an open casket funeral so everyone could see the violence committed against her son. When the two men indicted for the crime were acquitted by an all-white, male jury, it was one of the sparks that ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Months after the trial, one of the acquitted would admit murdering the child to the media. Marilyn Nelson’s work is a crown of sonnets for Emmett Till. A crown consists of fifteen Italian or Petrarchan sonnets with the last line of each sonnet becoming the first line of the next. The fifteenth sonnet consists of the first line of the previous fourteen. Nelson states in her prologue that this immensely structured form of poetry was her way of “protecting [herself] from the intense pain of the subject matter.”

However, the beauty of Nelson’s work does not protect the reader from the harsh realities of the event and the intense emotions it brings to all who hear about it. Accompanied by remarkably simple illustrations by Philippe Lardy, each poem strikes a chord of emotion. Though in picture book format, the material is not for younger readers. Nelson makes the poetry, both its form and meanings, accessible to the high school reader through a prologue discussing her reasons for writing and back matter that includes the story of Emmett Till and notes on each one of the sonnets. There is also a note by Lardy, detailing the artist's choices in the illustrations and some of their meanings.

This review was originally written as coursework for a class on Young Adult literature.