Snuffles and Snouts

A collection of poetry about the often maligned but forever charming pig, by such writers as Lewis Carroll, Jane Yolen, J. Patrick Lewis, and James Reeves

Kindergarten-Grade 4?A collection of 25 pig poems, accompanied by Kellogg's exuberant watercolors. The authors are varied (Lewis Carroll, John Ciardi, Jane Yolen, Myra Cohn Livingston, as well as Robb and her husband among them), as is the quality of their work. While Kellogg's drawings are appealing as always, most of the poems are available in other collections. Like a pig at a fair, the book will be noticed, but it's not a prize-winner.?Kathleen Whalin, Greenwich Country Day School, CT
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Even show-stealing Miss Piggy might enjoy sharing the spotlight with the porcine stars of this ebullient collection of poems about pigs. Verses (from such poets as Ogden Nash, Myra Cohn Livingston and Mary Ann Hoberman) give the whole humorous hog on blue-ribbon porkers, bewigged pigs and outright swine. Robb opens the volume with some light verse of her own ("Madame Froufrou's Pet Boutique"), which makes up for what it lacks in meter with its enthusiastic humor. Kellogg's (Parents in the Pigpen, Pigs in the Tub) whimsical illustrations are dotted with clever details: a hog at a poetry reading holds a book titled "Pig Out for Poetry and Pizza"; at a "Public Bog" a sign advises parents that "Piglets must be supervised while wallowing." Move over, Babe-as that famous farmyard critic Charlotte the spider would say, these greedy, wallowing, slimy, prize-winning, winsome and chuffling pigs are "SOME PIGS!" Ages 6-10.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 4^-8. Can kids ever get enough of pigs and their nonsense? The 24 poems in this anthology wallow in the blubber and muck of pigs and show how much we are like them. There are poems about hogs in the drawing room, tranquil and unshaken, and about pigs in the sty, cooling off in the grime. Lewis Carroll uses his pig to parody romantic melancholy ("There was a Pig that sat alone / Beside a ruined Pump / By day and night he made his moan" ). Ann Whitford Paul loves the smell a piglet leaves when it nuzzles and slobbers on her hand. Kellogg's funny line-and-watercolor illustrations, like those he did for Amy Ehrlich's Parents in the Pigpen, Pigs in the Tub (1993), show pigs both as animals and as humans stripped of all decorum. As in all his farm books, he somehow manages to combine wild farce with a sense of pastoral bliss. Hazel Rochman