Color Me a Rhyme: Nature Poems for Young People
Gr. 4-6, younger for reading aloud. There's a lot of good stuff going on in this imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed collection. On one page of each double-page spread is a poem (in one case, two haiku) evoking a color in nature--gray, orange, blue, brown, yellow. Opposite is a photograph, by freelance photographer Jason Stemple (Yolen's son), set like a cabochon jewel on a pale background of related images and words: sloe, sable, and jet for black; plum, orchid, and amethyst for purple. Each word is printed in its own hue. Somewhere on each spread is a sliver of a quotation about the color, from Mother Goose ("Its fleece was white as snow") to Eugene Field ("Any color so long as it's red"). The book is a visual feast, and a verbal one, too, for the poems are striking: in "Green," "poets know / all the secret words, / some of which they make up, / all of which are / green." In "Pink: A Haiku," "A surge of sunlight / Shocks through stem and thistle hairs / A punk pink hairdo." In her author's note, which precedes the text,  Yolen urges readers to use the photographs as inspiration for their own poems, and she closes with "Crayons: A Rainbow Poem."GraceAnne DeCandidoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.