  | Full Text Reviews: Booklist - 12/15/2015 *Starred Review* This slim book provides a nuanced look at a familiar theme: poetry for the seasons. Taking a diary-like approach, the text begins and ends with the spring equinox, offering poems for different days throughout the year. A bluebird’s song starts things off, “poking / a tiny hole / through the edge of winter / and landing carefully / balancing gently / on the tip of spring.” Verse by verse, day by day, the snow melts, April showers fall, magnolias bloom, berries ripen, warm rivers beckon swimmers, fireflies twinkle, a new school year starts, leaves turn, and winter returns. The poems stand on their own as solidly as they connect to each other, inviting multiple readings to experience the details. Fogliano’s (If You Want to See a Whale, 2013) descriptions are laden with imagery, evoking the sensations felt by a change in temperature or the flavor of a blueberry. Complementing the poems are Morstad’s gouache and pencil-crayon illustrations, which range from effectively simple (a firefly glowing in the dark) to tantalizingly detailed (spot the inchworm or the ladybug in the shrubs). A multiracial cast of children relishing the delights of the seasons adds to this title’s appeal. Pair with Paul B. Janeczko’s Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems (2014) for another poetic look at the seasons. - Copyright 2015 Booklist. Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2016 Perhaps known best for her picture-book collaboration with Erin Stead (And Then It’s Spring, BCCB 3/12), author Fogliano turns here to a longer work of free verse, with four seasonal sections sporting a dozen imagery-rich poems apiece. Verses observe details ranging from flora to food about the seasons in small, delicate entries, some only a few lines (“just like a tiny, blue hello/ a crocus blooming/ in the snow”) and some longer. The verse gets a little repetitively gauzy at times, but it can also rise to the bijou clarity of Valerie Worth (All the Small Poems, BCCB 2/95), and it picks up energy in the Fall section’s poems about pumpkins and waddling ducks. Morstad’s gouache and pencil crayon art balances soft textures and crisp edges; a cast of children, with the main focus on a toasty-skinned, straight-banged girl, offers a pleasing combination of contemplation and action as the seasons roll on. The poems are utterly suitable to reading aloud as well as alone, and they could be used for a lyrical readers theater, perhaps in combination with Sidman’s Red Sings from Treetops (BCCB 3/09). DS - Copyright 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. School Library Journal - 12/01/2016 K-Gr 3—This evocative celebration of the four seasons through verse is an essential addition to poetry collections. Fogliano's text marries natural observations with human emotion to create a collection that is quiet but full of powerful feeling. Readers could easily incorporate the journal-like style to chronicle their burgeoning relationship with nature and time. Morstad's watercolor illustrations invoke the changing seasons with gentleness and beauty and invite closer inspection—a perfect complement to the well-crafted poems. - Copyright 2016 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Loading...
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