through the woods.
seasons with a girl and her dog. The book is illustrated in light-filled watercolors by Robbin Gourley. We begin with rows of leaves on the endpapers, then a view of a house with a path leading to the woods on the title page. The oft-overlooked credits spread is especially pretty—a row of weedy grass stalks on a sky-implying background. Of course, our true journey begins with “Invitation,” a poem that starts with the girl’s words and ends with the words of the forest itself. Here is the entire poem:

Mind you, the poems aren’t fall-themed—but each of these books is worth curling up with on a gray day or even one of those blue-sky days blazing with leaves. Don’t forget the apple cider!

Since I'm already in poetry mode this week, let me share with you a picture book that's a poem. Like many of my favorites, this one's out of print, so look for it at your library.

I had been a fan of poet Tony Johnston's An Old Shell: Poems of the Gallapagos for a few years when I came across The Whole Green World, which is one of those books people tend to call "a celebration of life." Each spread is composed of a stanza of the poem on the left, displayed inside a circle of items representing the theme of the stanza (watch especially for the circle of ladybugs and ants!). Then on the right-hand page, you find a series of illustrations of a child planting a little garden, accompanied by her dog.

The poem seems to ramble, including topics like shoes and cake as well as seeds, but it all combines wonderfully and deliberately to capture a child's meandering, light-filled view of the world. Here's the first stanza:

I've got a little pair of shoes.
(Comfy, cozy little shoes.)
Got a little pair of shoes
to walk the whole round world.

And you see the girl putting her shoes on, a book about gardening beside her and her dog peeking in the window along with the sun. She talks about her dog and the stick she digs with, then we get this stanza about seeds:

I've got a little sack of seeds.
(Fat and slick like glassy beads.)
Got a little sack of seeds
to plant the whole round world.

Far too many poetic picture book texts out there are mere verse, but Tony Johnston is the real deal, and it shows. The poem is beautifully crafted, a cheery and tongue-pleasing read. On top of that, the choice of Elisa Kleven to illustrate it is simply inspired. If you haven't seen Elisa Kleven's freewheeling art before, you're in for a treat. I suppose I'm biased: the one piece of original children's book illustration I've ever bought is a small Kleven work depicting kids cartwheeling among autumn trees. It hangs in my office where I can see it when I write, and it lifts my heart to look at it.

I just visited Kleven's website, and I learned two things: one, that she uses watercolor, colored pencil, ink, crayons, and collage to make her artwork, and two, that her style represents a vision of the world worth mentioning here. Listen to how the illustrator (often author-illustrator) talks about herself:

"I write and illustrate picture books because I've never outgrown a deep childhood urge to enter a magical world. As a child growing up in Los Angeles I used to wish that my huge, congested city were more like the places in the books that I loved - places where forests grew and seasons changed, where animals talked and anything was possible."

Somehow, Tony Johnston's poem and Elisa Kleven's art come together in this small book to recreate the world, making it more magical and happy without resorting to sticky sentimentality. Share Tony Johnston and Elisa Kleven's picture book with your own child, and learn to "dance the whole green world"!

When you read a lot of children's poetry anthologies, certain names show up over and over: Eve Merriam, David McCord, Lilian Moore, Myra Cohn Livingston, Bobbi Katz, Nikki Giovanni... And Karla Kuskin. Last Thursday, August 20, 2009, Karla Kuskin passed away at the age of 77. As I host Poetry Friday today, let me begin by honoring her.

Kuskin is probably best known as a poet, or as a writer of poetic picture books. I think her most memorable work in recent years might be The Philharmonic Gets Dressed, a book that looks at a concert by showing the musicians getting ready (illustrated by Marc Simont, 1982). Did you know that Kuskin was also an illustrator? Her first book, Roar and More, evolved from her senior art project at Yale University (1956, revised and republished 1990). According to her website, Kuskin wrote and illustrated 28 picture books, illustrated 15 books for other writers, and wrote 18 that were illustrated by other artists. I know I bought a book she wrote, Green as a Bean, for our school library not long ago (2006). Kuskin illustrated a book by Paula Fox, Traces, that came out in 2008. The book shows how the faintest images and fleeting moments make up our lives. One reviewer called it a fitting book for someone who has suffered a loss. Though that was not the book's original intent, it seems an appropriate thought about what has turned out to be Kuskin's last published work.

But quirky humor, not elegiac sadness, is the best tone to use when talking about Karla Kuskin. Her poems show us the wry yet child-like way she looked at the world. Like Shel Silverstein, Karla Kuskin was a little subversive and more than a little off the wall.

I happily reread her collected poems, Moon, Have You Met My Mother? (HarperCollins, 2003) over the last few days. The poem that strikes me as most often having been anthologized is the one about "a witch who knitted things" (only knitted them badly). That and the poem about a little bug sitting on a silver flower—who gets eaten by a big bug. The tongue-in-cheek tragedy concludes, "It isn't right/it isn't fair/That big bug ate that little bug/because that little bug was there." Then, after a solemn pause, we get a final line: "He even ate his underwear."

And don't forget Kuskin's Halloween witch poem, one of the best ever written (and quite a few children's poets have tried). Here's how it starts off:

Over the hills
where the edge of the light
deepens and darkens
to ebony night,
narrow hats high
above yellow bead eyes,
the tatter-haired witches
ride through the skies....

There are other poems that have been anthologized quite a bit, like the one about a little kid stuffed into some dozen layers of clothing for winter. Or the one about spring that starts out, "I'm shouting/I'm singing/I'm swinging through trees...." But now I'll share some of the less-anthologized pieces that stood out as I was reading. It's very clear Karla Kuskin loved—and carefully observed—cats. Here's part of a cat poem:

Examining the breeze.
A package neatly wrapped with tail
flicks a whisker
pleased.

Upon the stair.
Taking the air.
Unquestioned owner
of the comfortable chair.

Napping everywhere
stretched in the sun
as if the sun were hers
awash in warmth
and furs.

"As if the sun were hers"—I like how that captures not only a cat's penchant for sunning herself, but also her arrogance!

Now see how strangely Karla Kuskin remakes something like a tree:

...with small spring leaves
like small green dimes
that cast their shadows on the grass
a thousand separate times
with round brown branches
like outstretched sleeves
and the twigs come out as fingers
and the fingers hold the leaves....

Or notice how she has the snow describe itself:

I am softer
and colder
and whiter than you.
And I can do something
that you cannot do.
I can make anything
beautiful:
warehouses
train tracks
an old fence
cement.
I can make anything
everything
beautiful....

Where one person would have taken a first or second creative step, Kuskin took a third, and then a fourth:

If you could be small
would you be a mouse
or a mouse's child
or a mouse's house
or a mouse's house's
front door key?

A superb craftswoman, the poet once wrote a poem about how a poem is made. Of course, it is also about a cat. I think this is my very favorite, maybe because it is reserved, mysterious, and assured, yet nevertheless just a little silly (hmm, kind of like a cat!):

Take a word like cat
and build around it;
a fur room over here
a long meow
floating from the chimney like a smoke tail.
Draw with words.
Balance them like blocks.
Carve word furniture:
a jar of pussy willows,
catkins, phlox,
milk in a dish,
catnip pillows,
a silver bell,
a plaster bird,
and eaten fish.
When everything is perfect in its place
step back to view the home
that you have built of words around your word.
It is a poem.

In one clearly autobiographical poem, bookworm Karla tells of loving the rain because when she was a child, it meant the grown-ups didn't try to make her go outside and play. On dry, ordinary days, they did interrupt her reading:

...while one's elders,
tall and grey,
said, "Darling, do go out and play."
And Darling shot them such look,
from over some beloved book
that Mother, or some timid aunt
would turn,
without a word indeed,
to darn a sock, deadhead a plant
and leave me be
and let me read.
Rain was my ally and salvation
defending me from confrontation....

After a bit more about the joys of curling up with a book in a thunderstorm, Kuskin concludes slyly:

Then picture this,
come Armageddon,
quite undisturbed
she sat and read on.

Another poem advises children how to behave:

Do not jump on ancient uncles.
Do not yell at average mice.
Do not wear a broom to breakfast.
Do not ask a snake's advice....

"Average mice"? Kuskin was not an average thinker! She offered this poetic counsel regarding the creative process:

Write about a radish
too many people write about the moon.

Then she proceeded to write soulfully about the radish rising "in the waiting sky."

Funny as she was, the poet could paint a picture of sadness using just a few words:

It is grey out.
It is grey in.
In me
it is as grey as the day is grey.
The trees look sad
and I,
not knowing why I do,
cry.

I'll conclude with this poem, which I think describes what Karla Kuskin did with her own life:

People always say to me
"What do you think you'd like to be
when you grow up?"
And I say "Why,
I think I'd like to be the sky
or be a plane or train or mouse
or maybe be a haunted house
or something furry, rough and wild...
or maybe I will stay a child."

Note: The poems and parts of poems quoted above are all from Moon, Have You Met My Mother? (Laura Geringer Books, HarperCollins, 2003, illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier)



Poetry Friday

Browse this gathering of poetic blog posts! Posted throughout the day...

--A Year of Reading introduces us to a book of poems by young people, Tastes Like Chocolate.

--Laura Salas brings us a couple of David Harrison's bug poems and a collection of 15 Words or Less Poems about what happens when flames and flowers meet aerogel.

--Andromeda Jazmon of A Wrung Sponge shares her back-to-school poem, written for this week's Monday Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

--Bildungsroman shares a nursery rhyme Lewis Carroll used in one of his books.

--Diane Chen at SLJ's Practically Paradise shares Mary Ann Hoberman and Linda Winston's collection The Tree That Time Built.

--Laura Shovan of Author Amok posts Gary Snyder's "How Poetry Comes to Me," one of the poems she uses as a model in her poetry workshops.

--Shelf Elf reviews a fun back-to-school novel in verse, Zorgamazoo by Robert Paul Weston.

--Liz Scanlon has written a poem on a dare. Check it out at Liz In Ink!

--April Halprin Wayland shares a brief, but powerful, George Ella Lyon poem at Teaching Authors.

--Wind Spirit Girl has created a striking visual poem inspired by Andy Behrman's Electroboy, a memoir about his struggle with bipolar disorder.

--At On Point, Lorie Ann Grover is celebrating her daughter's Sweet Sixteen in haiku, "Two to Sixteen". And over at readertotz, she gives us "Dreams".

--Online Color is featuring her friend, January O'Neil, whose debut collection of poems for grown-ups, Underlife, is coming out in September.

--Write Time's Linda Kulp has written an original poem about an abused dog, "Trooper."

--Sally of Paper Tigers reviews a collection of poems chosen by children for children in aid of The International Year of the Child, I Like This Poem.

--Massachusetts writer Martha Calderaro shares an anonymous poem about differences of opinion, "Corners on the Curving Sky," in honor of Senator Ted Kennedy's passing earlier this week.

--Barbarah of Stray Thoughts shares a religious poem about Jesus Christ, "My Advocate" by Martha Snell Nicholson.

--Librarian Jone MacCulloch recommends This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World, edited by poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Today she shares a Tunisian poem from the collection, "Pen." (I own this book and heartily concur!)

--Also in remembrance of Senator Kennedy, Random Noodling's Diane Mayr has posted a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox called "My Grave."

--Beth Brezenoff of the Stone Arch Books Blog reminds us that Emily Dickinson is "always a good thing" with this poem.

--Tricia of The Miss Rumphius Effect fame chose a poem by Ted Kooser, "A Spiral Notebook."

--Read Write Believe's Sara shares some Lyle Lovett lyrics, "If I Had a Boat"; she also provides a link for hearing him sing them!

--Librarian Kurious Kitty reviews a collection of poems for grown-ups about devastating Hurricane Katrina, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. The poem she shares is "Katrina."

--Jama of Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup is "asking everyone to confess their food sins," tempting us with a poem called "Eve's Confession," by Diane Lockward. (Ooh, apple fritters!)

--Author Mitali Perkins tells us, "On my blog, an American teen from Ghana expresses joy and strength in a prize-winning poem about dance."

--Kelly Polark has posted an original poem about sailing titled "The Dream" on her blog.

--Elaine Magliaro goes all out with a review of J. Patrick Lewis's new poetry collection, Countdown to Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year at Wild Rose Reader; a 1956 back-to-school poem for the Miss Rumphius Effect Poetry Stretch that's "a tad dark" at Political Verses; and a poem by Ron Koertge titled "First Grade" at Blue Rose Girls.

--Karen Edmisten shares some poetic words from St. Augustine on her blog in honor of his feast day.

--Gavin of In a Heron's Eye offers us a poem by Bridget Pegeen Kelly called "The Leaving."

--Tarie reviews Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat at Into the Wardrobe. (This is another book I really like!)

--Heliodora's husband left a magnetic poetry haiku on the fridge this morning...

--Tabatha A. Yeats gives us an original poem titled "Nighttime Symphony"; she also shares some of Basho's haiku and links us to a bunch of zombie haiku parodies with an example from "Robert Frost." Very fun!

--Julie Larios commemorates two heart-wrenching anniversaries, first reminding us that Emmett Till was murdered 54 years ago today. She provides a link to an interview with Marilyn Nelson, author of the award-winning book of poems titled A Wreath for Emmett Till. In addition, tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Julie shares her poem, "Flood," as well as providing a link to a documentary about the aftermath of the disaster in the poorest neighborhoods of New Orleans.

--The Write Sisters offer up "The Centaur," a poem by May Swenson.

--Father Goose has written a fall poem called "Something Silent in the Air."

--At Picture Book of the Day, Anastasia Suen highlights a story in rhyme, Wake Up Engines by author Denise Dowling Mortensen and illustrator Melissa Iwai. She also provides a writing lesson to go with it.

--Sherry of Semicolon celebrates the birthday of John Betjeman, Poet Laureate of England from 1972 till his death in 1984, quoting to us from his poem "Verses Turned."

--Melissa Wiley over at Here in the Bonny Glen reminds us of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire with Robert Pinsky's poem, "Shirtwaist."


Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Poetry Friday--what a great selection of thoughts and voices and verses! Sometimes I feel like I'm the only "poetry person" around, and this event reminds me that there's a wonderful poem-minded community out there.

You know how Natalie Cole sang duets with her late father, Nat King Cole, after his passing, which almost seems macabre except that the songs are really very pretty? Well, now we have The Frogs and Toads All Sang, a book of poems and drawings by the late Arnold Lobel, with color added to the sketches by Lobel’s grown daughter, Adrianne Lobel.

There’s a nice story behind the book. We learn in Adrianne’s introduction that a children’s book expert and collector named Justin Schiller purchased a set of small handmade books at an estate auction of Crosby Bonsall (another famous children’s book writer and illustrator, e.g., of Who’s a Pest?). The little books had been created by Arnold Lobel for his friends. Mr. Schiller contacted Adrianne to let her know about his find.

Lobel’s daughter ended up working with publisher HarperCollins to make the sketches and poems into a book, adding watercolor washes. As Adrianne Lobel points out, these sketches are looser than the illustration her father had been doing at the time and seem to have contributed toward his eventual style on the famous Frog and Toad books, which they predate. (Adrianne Lobel is a Broadway set designer, and one of her projects was the musical, A Year with Frog and Toad.)

The Frogs and Toads All Sang is brief, consisting of only ten illustrated poems. But what of those poems? Some are a bit ordinary in spots, but Lobel understood the need for a clever twist in the final line or two. Here’s just one example, the title poem:

“We’re going to have a party,”
The frogs and toads all sang.
“We’ve got lemonade with ice cubes
And paper lamps to hang.”
The ladies wore long dresses,
And the gentlemen wore pants.
The orchestra was ready,
So they all began to dance.
They danced in the meadow.
They danced in the street.
They danced in the lemonade
Just to cool their feet.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but Lobel’s illustrations for the poems are delightful. They are a little less finished than his formal art for picture books, which gives them an endearing softness. The man conveys such personality and humor in a few swift lines, especially with his amphibians’ facial expressions!

The Frogs and Toads All Sang has an unselfconscious charm that makes it a nice addition to any child’s library, and it is an especially good pick for children’s book collectors. Think of it—in its earliest incarnation, the book was meant as a gift for Arnold Lobel’s friends. It may sound a little presumptuous, but I feel there are many of us who care so much about Frog and Toad, not to mention the mouse in Mouse Soup, that we now count ourselves among Lobel’s friends. I like to think this book is for us.

I was reading The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children, edited by Philip Hawthorn (Usborne, 2004), when I came up with the Wynken, Blynken, and Nod rule, which states that any poetry collection for little kids that includes Eugene Fields’s sappy poem, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” should be red-flagged as being behind the times. I solemnly swear that I came up with the rule before the British Corollary occurred to me. It states that any book of poems for small children which includes “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” is likely to be British.

Sure enough, the only other book of the five I’m reviewing that includes WBN is My First Oxford Book of Poems, edited by John Foster (Oxford UP, 2000). Now, random as my rule may seem, it hints at other facets of children’s poetry collections published by the Brits. In general, I found the poems to be more sophisticated. Whether this means that UK editors consider young children to be capable of listening to longer, more complex poems than American editors do or simply indicates that they had a wider age range in mind, I do not know. But I do know that the two British collections include more classic, literary poems than the other three collections. The books somehow seems more stately to me than the American ones, if a little old-fashioned. They also have the advantage of drawing on poets not always added to American collections, e.g., John Agard and Roger McGough. This may be more of a sideways shift than a measure of fuller breadth, but it is still refreshing.

Heavy hitters like William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Shakespeare are represented in Philip Hawthorn's Usborne anthology, but so are Spike Milligan, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Roald Dahl, and the famous Anon. (Did you know that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that verse about the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead? I didn’t!) I particularly enjoyed the poems I hadn’t read elsewhere, such as the first in the collection, “Magic Cat,” by Peter Dixon. The poem tells of a family cat who accidentally becomes magic and then turns the human family members into various things with her wand of a tail. Roger McGough has three poems in the collection. My favorite is “The Sound Collector,” in which an ominous figure carries away all of the household sounds in a bag. “He didn’t leave his name/Left us only silence....”

Cathy Shimmen’s illustrations suit Hawthorn’s book, light and bright without being saccharine. They don’t overpower the poems, but they do round out the pages nicely. The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children skews a little old for toddlers, but it’s a solid collection for four- to eight-year-olds.

One thing I like about John Foster’s collection, My First Oxford Book of Poems, is that he organizes the poems into categories: Out and About, Creatures, From Dusk till Dawn, Beside the Sea, Fantastical and Nonsensical, and Weather and Seasons. A children’s poetry collection can feel like such a jumble without an organizational strategy, and besides, I like being able to read one section each night before bed.

I can almost forgive Foster for his inclusion of the overly adorable WBN because he also includes Nancy Willard’s marvelous, mysterious bedtime poem, “Magic Story for Falling Asleep,” which begins: “When the last giant came out of his cave/and his bones turned into the mountain/and his clothes turned into the flowers/nothing was left but his tooth....” Foster ranges a little farther afield with his choices than Hawthorn does, pulling in some poets who are less well known and are more contemporary, such as William Jay Smith, Kaye Starbird, Judith Nicholls, and Russell Hoban. Listen to this passage from Richard Edwards’s strange and beautiful poem, “Badgers”: “Badgers don’t jump when a vixon screams,/Badgers drink quietly from moonshiny streams,/Badgers dig holes in our dreams.”

I am a big fan of Eleanor Farjeon, so I was pleased to see three of her poems in this book. And take a look at the first stanza of Sue Cowling’s poem, “Pond”: “The pond is green as glass, the water slow,/It barely stirs the frills and fronds of weeds./Ponds have all day to dream, nowhere to go.”

The interior illustrations for My First Oxford Book of Poems are by eight different artists, so maybe it isn’t surprising that I thought they were a mixed bag. I’ve seen incredible poetry collections illustrated by various artists; however, some of the illustrations in this book are far more evocative than others. Like Hawthorn’s book, My First Oxford Book of Poems runs older, in spite of the title. I would recommend it for five- to eight-year-olds.

In comparing the two anthologies, I discovered that Hawthorn’s collection was more rollicking than Foster’s, jumping around from one subject to another and offering readers more funny poems. Foster’s collection had a more consistent tone—even with occasional touches of humor, it felt strongly imagistic, even haunting, to me.

Of course, no talk of poetry collections would be complete without the inimitable Lee Bennett Hopkins, so let’s look at his anthology, Climb into My Lap: First Poems to Read Together (Simon and Schuster, 1998). Like Foster’s book, it is divided into categories: Me! Secret Places, It’s So Funny! Some People, Worlds of Make-Believe, It’s Story Time! Little Hands and Fingers—Little Toes and Feet, and Good Night. You should know that Hopkins creates his collections, not only by looking at poems which are already out there, but by recruiting promising poets to write to the themes he’s selected.

Like Foster, Hopkins gets extra points for including Nancy Willard’s poem, “Magic Story for Falling Asleep.” But oh—I’m in shock! I just found WBN lurking two-thirds of the way through the book! (Not sure I’ll recover from the blow.) So much for the British Corollary. Perhaps we’re looking at the age of these editors? (I’ve gone from sounding anti-Brit to ageist in one fell swoop!)

Climb into My Lap is for a younger audience than the first two—I would recommend it for three- to seven-year-olds. The editor is particularly skilled at slipping back and forth between the pensive and the playful. The poems in this collection also strike me as being more straightforward, but in some cases this means they are less imagistic than the ones collected by Hawthorn and Foster. Still, the best poems in Climb into My Lap are lovely. Besides which, any collection that includes Deborah Chandra has got to be good! And Hopkins has chosen one of my favorite poems ever, Charlotte Zolotow’s “People,” which begins, “Some people talk and talk/and never say a thing./Some people look at you/and birds begin to sing.”

Kathryn Brown’s art for Hopkins’s anthology is just right, clear yet soft, as well as subtly multicultural. I don’t know which I like better, her cast of children or her day-and-night illustrations of the famous Quangle Wangle’s hat. (You should know that Climb into My Lap is out of print, so check it out at the library or track down a used copy.)

Jack Prelutsky’s contribution to this corner of the poetry world is Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (Knopf, 1986). Prelutsky is known for writing humorous poems with a lot of strong-edged sounds and wordplay, which pretty much describes the tone of his anthology. One example would be Lenore M. Link's "Holding Hands," which starts out, "Elephants walking/Along the trails/Are holding hands/By holding tails...." Marc Brown’s illustrations are just as playful as the poems. This collection has great kid appeal and is well suited to the reading needs of three- to seven-year-olds. Plus, no sign of the dreaded WBN.

I have to say, I do think this is the only time I’ve ever seen a poem from Maurice Sendak’s wonderful Chicken Soup with Rice anthologized—“January.” The other surprise is a snippet of Dr. Seuss, “We have two ducks. One blue. One black....” (Which makes me wonder, how much did they have to pay for the privilege of using those?) Among the many other poets Prelutsky features are Bobbi Katz, Judith Viorst, Myra Cohn Livingston, Aileen Fisher, Karla Kushkin, and Lilian Moore. His collection is perfect for having fun with words and for getting started with poetry. I should point out that there are a lot of poems squeezed onto the pages of Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, but the visual organization is clear enough that all but the very youngest readers should be able to follow it.

Jane Yolen, AKA Madame Versatile, recently gave us another poetry collection for small children, Here’s a Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry (Candlewick, 2007). Her co-editor is Andrew Fusek Peters and her illustrator is Polly Dunbar. Which means that here is, not only a little poem, but the best of both worlds—American Yolen working with two Brits to create something that's simply gorgeous.

The collection is divided into four sections: Me, Myself and I; Who Lives in My House? I Go Outside; and Time for Bed. This book really, truly is for small children, probably ages two to five. It contains far fewer poems than Prelutsky’s collection, but the presentation is stunning, with only one or two poems per spread, each encompassed by light, fresh illustrations. Even the font is large and simple, sans serif so that a kindergartener could read it with some help.

The poets represented here are from both the U.S. and Great Britain. Though all of the poems are uncomplicated and many are funny, the editors manage to work in some nice imagery along the way. For example, here’s an excerpt from Berlie Doherty’s poem, “Grandpa”:“Grandpa’s hands are as rough as/Garden sacks/And as warm as pockets....” We also find “Bumblebee,” not the piece of writing for which Margaret Wise Brown is best known, but a poem with one of my favorite similes of all time: “Where are you taking/Your golden plunder/Humming along/Like baby thunder?”

Here’s a Little Poem avoids the indignity of “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”; instead we get bedtime poems like Dennis Lee’s, which begins, “Silverly,/Silverly,/Over the/Trees,/The moon drifts/By on a/Runaway/Breeze.”

I’ll add that any “first collection of poems,” even Yolen’s, should be preceded or at least joined by a good Mother Goose. The best one I’ve come across is My Very First Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie and brilliantly illustrated by Rosemary Wells (Candlewick, 1999). After whetting your young child’s appetite with Mother Goose, you might consider reading the anthologies I’ve described in the following order: Here’s a Little Poem, Climb into My Lap, Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young, My First Oxford Book of Poems, and The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children. Once a week could even be poetry night at bedtime, with the other six nights saved for narrative and other picture books.

One final note: I’ve observed that most editors of poetry collections for children can’t resist slipping in a couple of their own poems. The question I always ask is, how do these poems hold up in comparison to the rest of the book? So here’s a quick report for you: Philip Hawthorn gives us “The Train from Loch Brane,” an adaptation of an anonymous poem called “Have You Ever Seen?” and “Classrhymes.” All three poems are pleasant, but not outstanding. John Foster does not include any of his own poems in his collection. Lee Bennett Hopkins offers up “My Name” and “Toy Telephone,” both clever and fun. He also retells a poem, “Five Great Big Dinosaurs.”

For his part, Jack Prelutsky gives us six poems: “Whistling,” “The House Mouse,” “Skeleton Parade,” “The Mistletoe,” “Sometimes,” and “Somersaults.” All six are well done, but I thought “Sometimes” was the most memorable. In any case, Prelutsky has much better poems in several of his own collections. Jane Yolen’s poems, “Recipe for Green” and “Dream Maker,” are both very good. I wasn’t as pleased by her daughter Heidi E.Y. Stemple’s poem, “Ice Cream Cone,” which is cute, but not striking.

These five anthologies are a way of dipping your toes into the friendly waters of children’s poetry. Eventually I’ll take a look at anthologies for slightly older children and then collections by individual poets. There are so many wonderful poets out there—Shel Silverstein, Kristine O’Connell George, and Valerie Worth are just a few of my favorites. But the five books I've talked about make a good starter set. Throw in the Mother Goose and you’re ready to play Pied Piper, leading your child toward an enduring love of words.