There’s a marvelous sense of composition to this attractive volume: the pictures and the poetry are tightly bound together in image and evocation. The poems, mostly short excerpts, look at the season of autumn in all of its aspects, and the poets range from Robert Browning, Shelley, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Marge Piercy, Amy Lowell, and Tzu Yeh. The language in each case is concrete and visual enough to rouse the spirit of children being read to; older children will delight in reading aloud themselves. Both will find the images in the poems made visible in the photographs. A particularly fine approach is the use of urban and rural autumnal images, and Tauss’s pictures use color, sepia, and black and white with suppleness and ingenuity. Walt Whitman’s excerpt from “come up from the fields father” floats over an almost Victorian image of a child with a cornucopia. William Ernest Henley’s four-line excerpt “For earth and sky and air / Are golden everywhere, / And golden with a gold so suave and fine / The looking on it lifts the heart like wine” shows a beautiful old building reflected upside-down in a glass ball, the whole suffused with burnished light. Despite the occasional difficulty in reading the text over the pictures, Henley’s quote could apply to these lovely images. (Poetry. 5-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-590-25347-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
With an eye toward easy memorization, Katz gathers over 50 short poems from the likes of Emily Dickinson, Valerie Worth, Jack Prelutsky, and Lewis Carroll, to such anonymous gems as “The Burp”—“Pardon me for being rude. / It was not me, it was my food. / It got so lonely down below, / it just popped up to say hello.” Katz includes five of her own verses, and promotes an evident newcomer, Emily George, with four entries. Hafner surrounds every selection with fine-lined cartoons, mostly of animals and children engaged in play, reading, or other familiar activities. Amid the ranks of similar collections, this shiny-faced newcomer may not stand out—but neither will it drift to the bottom of the class. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-47172-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
