Mathis Sharon Bell : Red Dog, Blue Fly

Football poems deal with plays, practice, coaches, games, touchdowns, defense, injuries, cheerleaders, and championships

Grade 3-5-- Mathis's fluid, rhythmic poems evoke the tensions, triumphs, and risks of football for young players and readers: worring about remembering signs or catching the ball (``Pigskin rascal/never kind/ too far in front/ or way behind''); facing friends across the line of scrimmage; winning a tense playoff game, and then a championship; and the happy victory banquet afterward. The blue-and-gold Panthers are the featured team, which has a female running back. Gilchrist's warm, domestic style is used to better effect in Little's Children of Long Ago (Philomel, 1988) and Greenfield's Nathaniel Talking (Black Butterfly, 1988) . Here the players, all black, change size from spread to spread and have a nebulous look, as if they're about to dissolve into the hazy backgrounds. Readers not yet ready for Lillian Morrison's collections of sports poetry (Crowell) might be attracted by the picture-book format. --John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Beginning with the title poem about a game in progress, a cycle that considers football's anxieties and satisfactions with entries on the ball, the coach, a touchdown, ``Ebonee'' (a girl who's a running back), etc., plus longer pieces on an injury and on the mixed feelings engendered by playing against a cousin; the season's-end trophy is celebrated with a feast of ``Curried goat and rabbit stew/fried fish chicken too/kale and mustard and collard greens/homemade ice cream and jelly beans.'' Not unusually compelling but nicely evocative, especially with Gilchrist's colorful art--in which lively action, sweeping across broad spreads, alternates with more intimate close-ups of the participants. (Poetry/Picture book. 6-11) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.