LEAF BY LEAF

There’s a marvelous sense of composition to this attractive volume: the pictures and the poetry are tightly bound together in image and evocation. The poems, mostly short excerpts, look at the season of autumn in all of its aspects, and the poets range from Robert Browning, Shelley, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Marge Piercy, Amy Lowell, and Tzu Yeh. The language in each case is concrete and visual enough to rouse the spirit of children being read to; older children will delight in reading aloud themselves. Both will find the images in the poems made visible in the photographs. A particularly fine approach is the use of urban and rural autumnal images, and Tauss’s pictures use color, sepia, and black and white with suppleness and ingenuity. Walt Whitman’s excerpt from “come up from the fields father” floats over an almost Victorian image of a child with a cornucopia. William Ernest Henley’s four-line excerpt “For earth and sky and air / Are golden everywhere, / And golden with a gold so suave and fine / The looking on it lifts the heart like wine” shows a beautiful old building reflected upside-down in a glass ball, the whole suffused with burnished light. Despite the occasional difficulty in reading the text over the pictures, Henley’s quote could apply to these lovely images. (Poetry. 5-9)