IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Fear of the dark is a widely shared pre-schooler reaction and the reassuring books come few and far between. This is a long poem about a little girl whose birthday wish to see the night is granted. Her report serves to remove the imagined horrors from night in the woods as it follows the girl and her father on their walk. Her flashlight reveals a world of small nocturnal creatures busy with their normal round. That the unending balance of nature is in full force is mentioned so casually and blithely -- ""Watch out, little mouse, in your velvet blouse/You'll stay under cover/if you are wise,/for the owl wants a dinner that,s Just your size.""-removes the menace traditionally associated with the situation by disengaging the first person of the poem from any concern while She finally arrives at a sense of oneness with the whole night scene. The bibliotherapeutic possibilities perhaps outweigh anything that might be said about the poem as poetry and, the fact that the night has been dressed by Adrienne Adams in the same rich black and Jewel colors she used for Cabbage Moon (p. 2, J-2) makes it well worth looking at.