HANDSPRINGS

Florian completes a quartet of seasonal poetic explorations with this thoughtful but humorous look at the joys of spring. The 29 rhyming poems cover many of the traditional aspects of springtime: baseball, rain and mud, planting seeds, April Fool’s Day and spring cleaning, as well as many views of the changes in the natural world. Several poems use rhyming couplets with a short line length of just two or three words (“Polliwog. / Big bull frog.”), showing the author’s skill at succinct expression. Other poems use creative type treatments (such as streams of vertical words for a poem on rain) to vary the presentation. Florian’s understated illustrations in watercolor and colored pencil provide touches of droll humor in his signature style. Teachers in the early elementary grades will find this volume a breath of fresh air for poetry studies in the last months of the school year. (Poetry. 5-9)