PIGEON CUBES AND OTHER VERSES

The ""pigeon cubes"" in Bodecker's opening (and title) poem are his playful version of what can happen if you allow yourself to be pigeon-holed; the second rhyme, about ""Sensible Sue"" who lived to be a hundred-and-one but never had any fun, has a similar anti-caution cautionary point. But such facile nonconformity, long entrenched as conventional wisdom, hasn't much bite. Several other entries here are neat, polished expressions of equally commonplace sentiments: They deplore pollution, suburban development, impersonal gray cityscapes, modern puffy bread, and Americans' need to make their small cars bigger. Bodecker's light verse is always elegantly turned, and there are several clever touches--as when his light ridicule of a man who obeys all traffic signs (the same old message) ends with the man ""PED X lNG"" and re-pedexing with pedexterity. Or when he extends an adage ("". . . the early/robin/gets the worm,/the early/ worm/just gets it"") . . . or fools around with the trite subject of a tulip growing in a littered yard. Equally proficient in the different arena of pure, non-topical nonsense is the rhyme on the ""metronome-pendulum syndrome"" that makes showering at sea a challenge. (""When you move to starboard/the shower moves back,"" and so on.) But kids are likely to find many of these rhymes, like the perfect prose of a character in one of them, ""too sweetly eloquaint.