The Horn Book Guide

LITERATURE

Levy, Constance

A Crack in the Clouds and Other Poems

40 pp. | McElderry | November, 1998 | Trade ISBN 0-689-82204-9 $$15.00

(3) 4-6 Illustrated by Robin Bell Corfield. Cricket song, icicles, weeds, and comets are some of the closely observed subjects of these poems. Using simple language and varied cadences, Levy's brief, humor-imbued poems render the familiar fresh. A bur is "a pod / of seeds / with an urge / to travel / but no wings to fly"; a large spider web is "lacy and round / a tablecloth / for a manhole cover." For fostering new ways of seeing the everyday world, this is accessible and engaging.

Reviewer: Carolyn Shute