My Own Song

Grade 5 Up. A crisp, clean collection of poems about music that in many ways serves as a companion volume to Poems That Sing to You (Boyds Mills, 1993). Once again, Strickland includes many previously unpublished poems and incorporates several selections of his own. Despite the inclusion of a Shakespeare sonnet and William Blake's "Song," the overall tone is decidedly contemporary. Sabee's rounded scratchboard illustrations add a cheerful counterpoint to poems such as Strickland's "Boom Box Bart" ("The kid is thunder./He's lightening./Rip roaring pouring rain") and Valerie Worth's "Bell" ("The bell gives/Metal a tongue-/To sing"). Many of the strongest entries (Jane Yolen's "Dinosaur Waltz" and "Dinosaur Hard Rock Band," X.J. Kennedy's "Into Mother's slide trombone," Valerie Worth's "Bell," and Eloise Greenfield's "Song of the Water Lilies") are available in other collections. There is no index. While one wants to applaud the impulse to feature poems to "groove to," Myra Cohn Livingston's Call Down the Moon (McElderry, 1995) is a far better collection celebrating the natural collaboration of poetry and musical themes.?Kathleen Whalin, Greenwich Country Day School, CT
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Strickland's second anthology of poems about music (Poems That Sing to You, 1993) contains 51 selections, including 6 of his own and 10 from some of the publisher's other authors. Most of the selections address singing, dancing, and playing instruments, but some (Shakespeare's ``Sonnet 130'') use music as only one of many images surrounding an entirely different subject. The scratchboard illustrations (reproduced in murky black-and-white) point to a young audience, but the book will be more useful as a resource for teachers, since the poems range in accessibility from Eleanor Farjeon's ``Music'' (``Can you dance? I love to dance!'') to William Blake's ``How sweet I roam'd from field to field,'' and some enigmatic work by Edvidge Giunta and Lisa Bahlinger. While there is much here that is first-rate, e.g., James Weldon Johnson's ``O Black and Unknown Bards,'' there is also a great deal that is unremarkable. The graceless design has three ill-assorted typefaces per page (four, when italics are used), blocks of text plunked down without regard for balance between type and leading, poems set almost into the gutter, and long pieces crammed on to one page. This is an uneven set of variations, poorly presented, on a marvelous theme. (Poetry. 9- 11) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.