MAKE THINGS FLY

``I wonder if a little breeze,/too small to play upon the trees,/can play on spider webs?'' asks Aileen Fisher, in a typically short poem in this collection on the subject of the wind. Among the contributors of the 27 selections are those associated with children's poetry—e.g., Eve Merriam and Norma Farber—as well as such familiar writers as Carl Sandburg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Christina Rossetti. The mood ranges from wishful musing to adventurous to scary. The book is a pleasing, practical size, with one-color illustrations in sepia pencil. Meret offers literal interpretations of the wind's pranks, with women's hair flying, stormy shipwrecks, galloping horsemen, and furniture sailing in a tornado. Although so many of the pieces are available in other volumes, the wind's ways form a benevolent umbrella under which to collect them anew. (indexes) (Poetry. 7-11)