Making a strong bid for the year’s most uproarious set of new verse, this collection opens with a “Whoosh!”—“The wind is blowing / quite a breeze. / The wind is blowing / on my knees. / The wind is blowing / its spring dance. / It tells me I / forgot my pants.” It closes by rhyming “laugh” with “giraffe,” and in between delivers an unrelieved spate of clever knee-slappers on topics from sports to siblings, shopping to passing gas. Koren illustrates each of the 100-plus entries with characteristic crosshatch sketches—mostly of children wearing innocent, glum, annoyed or ingratiating looks, as appropriate. Katz’s earlier outings, most of which were illustrated by David Catrow, may have more visual flash, but this one’s both larger and more suited to independent readers. Children—never mind adults—will find the urge to read aloud from these pages well nigh irresistible. One more: “I stuffed my lunch / in my race car— / salami and some soda. / It used to be a Chevy, / but it now is a / Toy-odor.” (Poetry. 7-11)
Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4169-0204-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512373-5
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
With an eye toward easy memorization, Katz gathers over 50 short poems from the likes of Emily Dickinson, Valerie Worth, Jack Prelutsky, and Lewis Carroll, to such anonymous gems as “The Burp”—“Pardon me for being rude. / It was not me, it was my food. / It got so lonely down below, / it just popped up to say hello.” Katz includes five of her own verses, and promotes an evident newcomer, Emily George, with four entries. Hafner surrounds every selection with fine-lined cartoons, mostly of animals and children engaged in play, reading, or other familiar activities. Amid the ranks of similar collections, this shiny-faced newcomer may not stand out—but neither will it drift to the bottom of the class. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-47172-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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