POETRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: ANIMAL POEMS

The newest volume in the Poetry for Young People series continues the format; Hollander gathers 34 short selections on a common theme—here, real animals, as opposed to the imaginary sort—and prefaces each with cogent comments on the poet and on images or references in the poem that might be unfamiliar to young readers. His choices range from such chestnuts as Lear’s “Owl and the Pussy-cat” and Blake’s “The Tyger” to Wallace Stevens’s “Earthy Anecdote,” verses from Marianne Moore to a chameleon, May Swenson on tourists viewing bison, and, to close, a lyrical, 900-year-old fragmentary lullaby from Greek poet Alcman. Mulazzani poses animatedly the creatures in her painted illustrations, against simplified natural backgrounds, and aside from misrepresenting the titular feline in Yeats’s “Cat and the Moon” as tiger-striped, sticks to literal interpretations. Despite notably inconsistent page design that even has the text of one poem (William Carlos Williams’s “Gulls”) switching from black to white in mid-course, this, like its predecessors, will help readers at least begin to understand what poetry is all about, without waxing too intrusively pedantic. (Poetry. 10+)