Florian completes a quartet of seasonal poetic explorations with this thoughtful but humorous look at the joys of spring. The 29 rhyming poems cover many of the traditional aspects of springtime: baseball, rain and mud, planting seeds, April Fool’s Day and spring cleaning, as well as many views of the changes in the natural world. Several poems use rhyming couplets with a short line length of just two or three words (“Polliwog. / Big bull frog.”), showing the author’s skill at succinct expression. Other poems use creative type treatments (such as streams of vertical words for a poem on rain) to vary the presentation. Florian’s understated illustrations in watercolor and colored pencil provide touches of droll humor in his signature style. Teachers in the early elementary grades will find this volume a breath of fresh air for poetry studies in the last months of the school year. (Poetry. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-009280-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | CHILDREN'S POETRY
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As atmospheric as its companion, Twilight Comes Twice, this tone poem pairs poetically intense writing with luminescent oils featuring widely spaced houses, open lawns, and clumps of autumnal trees, all lit by a huge full moon. Fletcher tracks that moon’s nocturnal path in language rich in metaphor: “With silent slippers / it climbs the night stairs,” “staining earth and sky with a ghostly glow,” lighting up a child’s bedroom, the wings of a small plane, moonflowers, and, ranging further afield, harbor waves and the shells of turtle hatchlings on a beach. Using creamy brushwork and subtly muted colors, Kiesler depicts each landscape, each night creature from Luna moths to a sleepless child and her cat, as well as the great moon sweeping across star-flecked skies, from varied but never vertiginous angles. Closing with moonset, as dawn illuminates the world with a different kind of light, this makes peaceful reading either in season, or on any moonlit night. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-16451-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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