ON THE WING

This collection of bird poems and paintings is a fine encore to Florian's Beast Feast (1994). As in that book, biology and whimsy combine in verse and pictures. In ``The Hawk''—``I stare/I glare/I gaze/I gawk/With keen/mean eyes/I am the hawk./All day I pray/For prey to view./Be thankful if/I don't/See/YOU!''—the words are accompanied by a picture of a lurking bird on a branch, a pair of binoculars hanging around its neck. Florian's watercolors match the tone of the verse, bright and funny portraits of individual birds, combining accurate representations with visual puns (the roadrunner has wheels, the nightjar is shown flapping its wings inside a jar). Nonfiction and humor don't always fit comfortably together, but in this book they become a delightful whole, a sturdy foundation from which to explore the playfulness of language. (Picture book/poetry. 2-8)