Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Donnelly, Daria
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Daria Donnelly Daria Donnelly, a free-lance writer, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I was young our house was full of poetry. My mother spoke to us...
...Two contemporary poetry picture books we love are The Maestro Plays by Bill Martin, Jr...
...It is the most lyrical and delicate of her Noisy Books series, a hymn to a small dog's perception of the sound before the sound: "It was an alarm clock springing to ring...
...Finally, for adult readers, is David Lehman's superlative Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (University of Michigan $16.95, 266 pp...
...Each illustrator brings forward particular aspects of the world de-scribed by these weird anonymous rhymes: Lobel's Humpty Dumpty is a slow-motion fall into tragic consciousness...
...From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the capacious children's poetry treasury reigned: Louis Untermeyer in America, Barbara Ireson in England, plus new editions of Walter de la Mare's glorious mother of all anthologies, Come Hither, and its miniature, Tom Tiddler's Ground...
...Now a mother myself, I am delighting in the delight of a child hearing poems...
...The direct descendent of these wonderful companions is Neil Philip's A New Treasury of Poetry (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $27.50,256 pp...
...Both are illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky, whose witty and wild collages perfectly complement the verbal extravaganza...
...Henry Holt, $6, 36 pp...
...Lear is grand: his melancholy perfectly leavens the bizarre situations, absurd neologisms, and hyperbolic humor of the limericks and longer poems...
...offers the complete Lear with his own unsurpassed line drawings...
...It was the milkman whispering to his horse...
...It was a new leaf uncurling...
...My mother spoke to us in a lan-guage made magical and strange by poetic allusion...
...Our goings were (and are still) accompanied by her dramatic recitation of Juliet's "Farewell...
...with generous selections from Lear, Nash, Belloc, Carroll, and modern masters of nonsense...
...A perfect first anthology is X.J...
...Although there are many great illustrated versions of Edward Lear, the Everyman's Library Children's Classics edition of A Book of Nonsense (Knopf, $12.95, 287 pp...
...God knows when we shall meet again...
...Our other favorite anthologies are Barbara Rogasky's Winter Poems (Scholastic, $15.95,40 pp...
...Our favorite poems came from Louis Untermeyer's The Golden Treasury of Poetry, Mary O'Neill's Hailstones and Halibut Bones and, most memorably, Hein-rich Hoffman's Struwwelpeter, where punishments meted out by Fate (not parents...
...to disobedient children were thrillingly hyperbolic...
...and The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose (Knopf, $21,176 pp...
...In our home, Mother Goose is queen and Edward Lear a prince...
...and Jamey Gambrell's adaptation of Kornei Chukovsky's Russian nonsense poem, Telephone (North-South Books, $15.95, 25 pp...
...sublimely illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, and Naomi Shihab Nye's This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World (Simon and Schuster, $17,212 pp...
...Over the Moon, illustrated by Charlotte Voake (Candlewick, $12.99,121 pp...
...Learn how John Ash-bery, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and the pseudonymous nonpareil Jim Dolot make poems...
...with pictures by Jane Dyer...
...It was a butterfly unfolding his wings...
...Children are natural poets words for them being more matter than medium and their canny and joyful response to poetry can refresh the most weary user of language...
...Serious fun...
...an anthology in which eighty-five leading contemporary poets present and comment on one of their poems...
...We like three Mother Goose picture books very much: My Very First Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells (Candlewick, $21.99,107 pp...
...Voake emphasizes his serene acceptance of the inevitable smash-up and the absurdity of horses and men laboring so earnestly against it...
...In the present picture book renaissance, some older books are coming back into print, and Margaret Wise Brown's 1950 The Quiet Noisy Book with pictures by Leonard Weisgard (Harper Trophy, $4.95,35 pp...
...with woodcut illustrations by John Lawrence, great for all ages...
...Lear fans will also enjoy Quentin Blake's illustrated Penguin Book of Nonsense Verse (Penguin, $12.95,283 pp...
...and Dorothy Kennedy's Talking Like the Rain (Little Brown, $19.95, 96 pp...
...Merry Christmas...
...Both are gorgeous, intelligent collections one opening up our understanding of a season, the other of our world...
...Like other children, each night we gathered on one bed and our mother read to us...
...Wells figures Humpty as the victim of an impish youngster who tips his dreaded eggcup off the table, his tin soldiers attentive if bewildered witnesses...
...is one not to be missed...
...One of my favorite poems in the world is "The Quangle Wangle's Hat" about a morose Quangle Wangle whose mood lifts when he lets his 102-foot-wide beaver hat become a nest for all comers...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
