Seasons

School Library Journal

Gr 4-6-- One wonders about the audience for this interesting but flawed poetry collection. At first glance the surreal oil paintings look as though they would appeal to picture book readers, but they are full of subtleties and visual games that these young children would miss. The four or five lines of verse accompanying each illustration are drawn from multicultural sources, but range from children's rhymes to fragments of Wallace Stevens and the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, among others. The 20 spreads are divided into seasons by a strip of color on the left. Information about the poet and the poem are imprinted on this strip, and the dark blue ``winter'' color makes the type almost illegible. The paintings were assembled from work done by the illustrator from 1978-1987, and have as little in common as the poems that tie the collection together. A handsome book that fails to satisfy. --Rosanne Cerny, Queens Borough Public Library, NY