COME TO THE GREAT WORLD

Moxley’s distant, restrained depictions of children at play strike appropriately dispiriting visual notes for this uninspired gathering of poems—billed as coming “from around the world,” though all were written in English, and over half by poets living either in England or North America. Aside from Sheila Hamanaka’s “All the Colors of the Earth,” Rabindranath Tagore’s “Paper Boats” (both previously published as solo titles for children), and a passionate screed from pseudonymous South American Teresa de Jesús—“When I see food / tossed into the garbage / and a poor man poking around in case / it isn’t rotten yet / it makes me furious!”—the entries are largely bland, prosaic observations about trees, seasons, hair, or the sky; jump-rope rhymes; or two chestnuts from Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. Capped by biographical notes so skimpy that two contributors aren’t even mentioned, this also-ran isn’t likely to reach readers the way James Berry’s Around the World in Eighty Poems (2002), Floella Benjamin’s Skip Across the Ocean (1995), or any number of similar offerings with an international focus have. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)