Keepers

A collection of poems including "Last Patch of Snow," "A Frog in a Well Explains the World," and "My Old Dog"

Grade 1-3-A collection of poems about moments and objects that linger in children's memories. Rand's gloriously colorful paintings anchor the poems solidly in one moment in time-readers sit with a boy in a boat as he struggles to remove a fishhook ("I worked the metal from/his lip, and with my finger/stroked his head/and wished that I could slip/him overboard/but didn't dare"); walk into the woods "where little wispy things/in gown and hood/slide down the dark/and fold their wings"; and swing through the night sky on a silver trapeze. Some poems miss the mark-children may not wonder about real skeleton keys ("do they rattle around whenever they please/Is that why they call them skeleton keys?") or lament the loss of a father's gift ("and if I had a uke today/I don't suppose that I could/play the thing at all"), but most of the poems and paintings, like those in Charlotte Huck's Secret Places (Greenwillow, 1993), do speak to the experiences and imaginings of young people.
Kathleen Whalin, Greenwich Country Day School, CT
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This uneven collection of poems from Schertle (Maisie, 1995, etc.), while including a few humorous moments, often suffers from preciousness or collapses under the strain of overwrought imagery. A boastful beetle stars in one of the finest pieces, a crude little taunter who gets smoked by a woodpecker; charming, also, is the lizard who busily cranks out thirty push-ups while on the vertical. When haiku is attempted--``The thin shadow of/a fox slides across the wall/of the chicken coop''--the result is wooden instead of oblique. Other poems seem to reach too hard, with self-conscious results: ``Shy and hidden/shadow things/of pipe and ring/and strange remembered power./Shadow voices/ high and thin/quiver in the wind/this witching hour.'' Pipe and ring? Remembered power? Rand's illustrations have a certain atmospheric power, but sometimes accentuate the mawkish aspects of the poems. (Picture book/poetry. 5+) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ages 6^-10. Unlike Schertle's How Now Brown Cow (1994), this poetry collection has no one theme--except perhaps the author's unique perspective that changes the ordinary into the extraordinary. In her poems, a skeleton key opens "a house with a tombstone door," and the ribs of a sunken galleon echo the sounds made by the bones of drowned mariners. Much of the poetry is thought provoking, requiring a more sophisticated audience. In the poem "Monopoly," for example, a girl on a hilltop contemplates a city spread out below her like a Monopoly board, with "little plastic folk asking how the game is scored." Although the picture-book format may chase older readers away, Rand does a fine job exploring the poetry visually. While his pictures are full of whimsical touches, they still seem natural and realistic. Susan Dove Lempke