THE ALLEY CAT

Christiana, the gifted author-illustrator of Drawer in a Drawer (1990), does his best, but it's still not quite enough to retrieve this doggerel account of a cat scrapping with another tom to win a chop flung out by the butcher's wife (``A monstrous woman thick of brow/With shoulders broader than a cow,/She squints through cold, unfeeling eyes./Her thick hands heave the tasty prize...'') and then, quite unrealistically, taking it home to his mate and little ones. The descriptions in the insistently rhythmic verse seem forced and just aren't very interesting. Still, Christiana's fans will be intrigued by his darkly luminous palette of brick and gray, his daring points of view, and his smooth segues from cubist renderings of the trash in the alley to the vivid, freely drawn, impressionistic ``Big Red'' and his feral pals. (Picture book. 4-8)