MOTHER GOOSE: Illustrations by 16 illustrators
Groundwood, 32 pages, $9.95, ages 0 to 3
The royalties from the sale of this board book go to the Parent-Child Mother Goose Program , a national organization with a mission to strengthen and enhance the relationship between parents/caregivers and babies and small children through the pleasure, power and mutual delight of rhymes and storytelling.
This Mother Goose , a compilation of well-known and not-so-well-known rhymes (i.e. not Jack and Jill ), offers visual and aural delights aplenty.
Each of the 16 rhymes occupies a double-page canvas, thus offering ample scope for each of the 16 artists to wield pen and brush to great and often idiosyncratic effect. Barbara Reid, the queen of Plasticine art, has sculpted a hilarious trio in “Father and Mother and Uncle John/ Went to market one by one./ Father fell off./ Mother fell off./ But Uncle John went on and on and on and on ...” Uncle John, riding a bridled ostrich, is heading off to parts unknown, leaving Ma and Pa unhorsed and un-unicycled in his wake.
In a quieter vein, Mark Thurman's benevolent man in the moon makes eye contact with a baby, in whose voice the rhyme must surely be: “The moon is round/ As round as can be./ Two eyes, a nose and a mouth/ Like me!” In Hey Diddle Diddle , Gary Clement's cat playing the fiddle has a more than knowing gleam in his sly green eyes, the cow is pole vaulting over the moon, and the little dog is upside down, quite beside himself with laughter as he watches the dish run away with the spoon.
BIRDS
By Kevin Henkes, illustrated by Laura Dronzek, Greenwillow, 32 pages, $19.50, ages 3 to 6
This is a book for right now, the now when a pair of blue jays is making a nest in the next-door tree and cardinals play their insistent song at daybreak and at dusk. It begins with the words, “In the morning, I hear birds singing through the open window,” words that spread out over two pages of open window framing a turquoise blue sky and a robin singing in the branches of an apple tree in full bloom.
The book continues on its exuberant, digressive way, its acrylic paintings as elemental as the feelings they inspire, its font sizes changeable and its text just enough of an enoughness. Birds, we are told, “can be yellow/ or blue/ or brown/ or red, or even green, I think.” They can be as big as an unnamed bird that might be a flamingo (only long legs visible) or as little as another bird that must be a hummingbird, “or any size in between,” like the owl, seagull, bluebird and plover on the facing page.
Seven birds on a telephone wire – a configuration repeated three times on the page – that don't move, and don't move, and don't move until ... “I looked away for just one second ... [turn the page] and they were gone.” Leaving nothing but a straight line drawn across the next two pages.
Musings follow, on what the sky would look like if clouds were birds, or if birds made marks with their tail feathers as they flew, along with ruminations about that red bird in the winter tree – proof positive that Birds will have a longer lifespan than just spring, just now.
ORANGUTAN TONGS: Poems to Tangle Your Tongue
By Jon Agee, Disney/Hyperion, 48 pages, $20.99, ages 5 to 8
Some are longish, some are shortish, but all of the poems in this collection share a common trait: Each has one line (or more) that will tangle your tongue, i.e. leave you not a little tongue-tied. All will be elixir for those of us who are discovering how to play with language.
Take Overeager Ogre , for instance, a short poem dwarfed by its accompanying illustration of a fearsome, greenish ogre wielding a knife and fork as though they were weapons:
