THIS IS A TINY FRAGILE SNAKE

A seasonal cycle of poems examines the gentle confrontations that result when human-built environments share space with animal habitats.

Ruddock composes most poems as two or three quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. While Barron’s lively cut-paper collages depict racially diverse children as the presumed narrators of the animal interactions, the balladlike stanzas, peppered with old-fashioned phrasing, belie the authorial voice of a ruminating adult. After the titular snake is nearly stepped on, “we trapped her in a coffee cup, / a playing card to seal, / and moved her to the nearby woods, / no longer under heel.” In “Bear,” a child avers, “One morning I set out upon / a quarter-mile jog, / when suddenly a lumbering bear / clambered from the bog.” The child “wisely” turns around and walks away; upon safely looking back, the child sees the creature “snuffling at blueberries”—she “cared not a bit for me.” Several poems visit interactions that will be familiar to many: picnic ants, a skunk on the porch, a squirrel intent on a pet dog’s kibble. Other entries focus on a fleeting twilight encounter between a moose and a family in a car and herons observed from a canoe. Barron supplies a bright abundance of supporting plants and animals for the poems’ spring-to-winter arc. Ruddock sticks a nice landing with “Winter,” citing each foregoing animal’s current status—including, “curled in a nest of moss / …our tiny fragile snake.”

Quaint poems, charmingly illustrated.