GALLOP-O-GALLOP

“Gallop-o-gallop-o-gallop along / singing-o-singing-o-singing a song / swift over hills, carry me there / the wind on my face / the sky in my hair.” Singsong rhymes and heartfelt sentiments ooze from this collection of 21 horse poems that offer few surprises in content or form. Written for a younger audience than Jessie Haas’s Hoofprints (2004), they also lack Hoofprints’s bite and originality. Lines such as, “I do know something changed in me / that wondrous night our foal was born,” barely deserve to be called poetry at all. On the other hand, the language won’t actually harm anyone, the acrylic illustrations are pretty and horse-crazy children will read just about anything about horses. An adequate addition to library collections that don’t have Lee Bennett Hopkins’s My Mane Catches the Wind (1979) or other better volumes. (Picture book/poetry. 5-9)