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YEAR AFTER YEAR by BiB--Photog Binzen

YEAR AFTER YEAR

By

Pub Date: Dec. 1st, 1976
Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

Binzen's color photos, arranged in four parts according to the seasons of the year, elicit essentially a picture-postcard response. True, the natural scenes as pictured here are indeed breathtaking, the smaller closeups add specificity, and there is continuity as well as impact in the pictures that show the same river bend and the same row of trees in their separate spring, summer, fall, and winter manifestations. But the brief quotations from Emily Dickinson that Binzen has chosen to tie the book together do nothing of the kind. For example, on a double-page featuring a little boy with a red wagon in an expanse of fallen leaves, the quote for fall reads, ""Frequently the woods are pink,/ Frequently are brown;/ Frequently the hills undress/ Behind my native town."" The other three matchings are no more apt and, altogether, the absence of any dialogue between Dickinson's quaint sensibility and Binzen's stunning but anonymous clarity only underlines the questionable nature of the album as a book at all, much less one for children.