Despite the title, Stevenson’s latest corncatenation of poems and pictures, or at least its second half, has an urban flavor, from buses full of children “[l]ooking for the universe” pulling up to the Hayden Planetarium to “I love dawn, / Especially with / New York City / under it” paired to a skyline. His loose, sketchy, watercolor vignettes capture their subjects’ essence as masterfully as ever, and repeatedly demonstrate his fondness for both the familiar (a ketchup bottle, a pigeon) and the inscrutable: what is that odd hoop attached to the curb? What are those big, complicated rail-yard machines? The terse, cornversational poetry may sometimes be inscrutable itself without the picture—“The sign on the restaurant window / makes you wonder, / Is this a boast, / Or a warning?” (The sign reads: “All baking done on premises.”) But readers overwhelmed by the recent tsunami of daffy, clever verse will find the reflective, faintly elegiac tone here a cornsiderable relief and a different reason to smile. (Poetry. 7-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000597-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Moxley’s distant, restrained depictions of children at play strike appropriately dispiriting visual notes for this uninspired gathering of poems—billed as coming “from around the world,” though all were written in English, and over half by poets living either in England or North America. Aside from Sheila Hamanaka’s “All the Colors of the Earth,” Rabindranath Tagore’s “Paper Boats” (both previously published as solo titles for children), and a passionate screed from pseudonymous South American Teresa de Jesús—“When I see food / tossed into the garbage / and a poor man poking around in case / it isn’t rotten yet / it makes me furious!”—the entries are largely bland, prosaic observations about trees, seasons, hair, or the sky; jump-rope rhymes; or two chestnuts from Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. Capped by biographical notes so skimpy that two contributors aren’t even mentioned, this also-ran isn’t likely to reach readers the way James Berry’s Around the World in Eighty Poems (2002), Floella Benjamin’s Skip Across the Ocean (1995), or any number of similar offerings with an international focus have. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8234-1822-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Wee folk star in a book of prankish poetry that celebrates the mischief and mere presence of inch-high magical and supernatural creatures. An illustrated table of contents introduces 17 poems and defines the fairy folk featured within. A leshy can be small as a blade of grass, a pixie wears green and changes size, a hobgoblin is fond of practical jokes, a spriggan is something of a bodyguard for fairies. Familiar and unknown poems are collected here, from classics such as Rachel Field’s “The Pointed People,” to contemporary entries by Kristine O’Connell George and Evans herself. The tone of the whole varies from page to page, as the more flowery, rhyming verse coexists with catchier entries such as “A Gnome Poem,” containing images of a gnome snuggled under a New Jersey map and on a mousepad or a stowaway troll in “Backpack Trouble.” Green, leafy artwork surrounds these magical folk in airy and woodsy settings, casting them as playful, curious, and cuddly. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82352-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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