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T A B L E++T A L K

Is "What to Expect When You're Expecting" a pregnancy bible or a loathsome, guilt-provoking book? Join the debate in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Bad news for G.I. Jane?
By Michelle Goldberg
Should the armed forces be segregated?
(01/09/98)

The Forgiven (Part 2)
By Michelle Goldberg
What do you call someone who befriends the man who tortured, raped, killed and cannibalized her daughter? Crazy? Or a saint?
(01/08/98)

The Forgiven (Part 1)
By Michelle Goldberg
Who would befriend such savage murderers? The victims' parents did
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Time for One Thing
By Elizabeth Rapoport
Stop apologizing
(01/06/98)

Cyberspace: The final dating frontier
By Eve Glicksman
A cyber romantic discovers that the Web can bring doctors, bankers, engineers and old college boyfriends to your door
(01/05/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY POLLY SHULMAN | On the battlefield of children's literature clash pair upon pair of starkly opposed forces: good and evil, chaos and order, vegetables and dessert, poetry and prose. For some of these wars, the conclusion is forgone. Good will always triumph over evil, at least in the books adults let kids read, and (with a few unsavory exceptions) dessert generally wins the day. But for some struggles, the victor is less obvious. Take poetry and prose. In our great grandparents' day, every boy could recite "Paul Revere's Ride" and every girl "The Highwayman." Then verse went into decline as T.S. Eliot beat out Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, until Dr. Seuss brought it back with a bang. When publishers tired of Seuss wannabes, prose rose. Lately, however, the tide has turned. Now rhyme and meter are once more running rampant through the juvenile lit shelves.

More power to them, say I, and so will your 4-year-old. Rhyme and meter are godsends for anyone learning to speak, read, sing or joke. They transform the random sounds we rely on for communication into inevitable music. They help us remember the lengths of months, the order of the letters and the worst names to call our siblings. They probably make us smarter, like listening to Mozart. And they're particularly effective at leashing emotions and plots that threaten to break out of control. The only catch is, they have to be handled with skill.

"Stomp, Stomp! A Dino Romp," by Bob Kolar, shows the new wave of verse at its best. Intended for very small people, the text is brief, with at most four words per spread. Many of those words are onomatopoeias. "STOMP, STOMP! Hee, hee. THUMP. WHUMP! Look at me!" begins the tale, as the young dinosaur hero leaves home, kicking over lamps, slamming the door and giggling at its handiwork. As the dino rampages across the savanna, scattering animals, it's the biggest thing in sight. It dwarfs the hippo; even the lion runs. Then -- "Stompity?" -- a shadow falls. Big Dino has arrived to claim its straying offspring. Kolar perfectly captures one of toddlerhood's joys: youthful passion comfortingly contained by adult authority, all in 36 rhyming words that don't miss a beat.

Nothing could be less fussy than this simple, exuberant book, yet a close look shows Kolar's exacting attention to detail. With so few words to work with, he makes every punctuation mark count. His sweet, visually effective watercolor technique could have been chosen for its symbolism. He draws his characters and scenery with fine outlines and colors precisely inside the lines. But by wetting the paper he lets the paint bleed out, creating energetic haloes around the characters that shade them and give them depth. It's a perfect technique for illustrating a story about the boundaries between the emotional self and the outside world.

Like "Stomp, Stomp!," Linnea Riley's "Mouse Mess" uses formalism -- collage illustrations, a verse text -- to control its central anarchy. The murine protagonist waits until the family whose house he shares has gone to bed, then raids their kitchen, with results that will be familiar to anyone who has lived with small creatures. The 4- to 7-year-olds who make up the book's target audience may not notice how carefully composed this chaos is, but the crumb-sweepers and spill-wipers reading it to them will. Riley cuts her olives, apple cores, forks, corn flakes, mice, milk jugs, water and so on out of paper that she has painted with sponges. The technique keeps edges sharply defined and shadow free. The dripping, toppling still lifes that result are oddly static.

Linnea's text is similarly simple and graphic: "Sniff-sniff, milk and cheese. Mouse would like a taste of these," goes a typical spread. For the most part, she sticks to trochaic tetrameter -- lines made up of four two-syllable feet, with the stress on the first syllable of each foot. It's the quintessential childhood meter, the rhythm of jump-rope songs and witches' incantations (e.g., "Engine, engine, number nine," or "Double, double, toil and trouble"). When Linnea varies the beat, she does so in ways that don't confuse people trying to read out loud: It makes no trouble for the reader that "Sniff-sniff" is a spondee, or double-stressed foot, and omits the two unstressed syllables called for in the meter. Linnea may leave out the occasional unstressed syllable, but she never makes a rhyme depend on one, and she never forces you to rush over words that cry out for stress. It's a relief to find such lovely order in a messy kitchen.

Dan Yaccarino's "Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I'm off to the Moon!" varies its rhythms quite a bit more than "Mouse Mess." But then, the story -- a little boy's straightforward fantasy trip to the moon and back -- has much less emotional chaos to contain. Yaccarino's paintings evoke the thrusting rockets, unearthly angles and sudden changes in acceleration that make being thrown in the air such a hoot to the book's 2-to-6-year-old intended audience. The hero looks like a stylized Tintin, his blond, cowlick-topped head as round as the fishbowl helmet of his space suit. Each page yields a punchy epigram, like "There's outer space all over the place," or "Moon rocks in a box." Occasional imperfect rhymes, such as the one in the title, may irritate purists. Still, you've got to love a book with the line "See you later, lunar crater."

Of course, most 6-year-olds and their readaloudtoers don't know from tetrameter, spondees and so on, so you might think they wouldn't be irked by the misuse of such things. Poetry, however, resembles a certain hirsute young person in that when it's good, it's well worth the admission price, but when it's bad it's awful. Even if your child doesn't find the bad stuff irksome, you sure will on the 20th reading. And there's a whole diaperload of the bad stuff out there.

Take Bill Maynard's "Incredible Ned." (Please!) The protagonist, poor thing, has the soul of an artist, which manifests itself by making every noun he pronounces appear over his head, to the amazement of his friends and the annoyance of his teachers. (At least, that's what the text tells us; for some reason Frank Remkiewicz's pictures show the objects beside Ned, behind him, around him -- everywhere but over his head.) Maynard unfolds Ned's story in anapestic tetrameter -- that's the ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM, ba-da-DUM rhythm for which Dr. Seuss is so justly renowned. To make Maynard's book work, though, you kind of have to cram some things in and stretch some things out. For example, try reading aloud the sentence "No wonder the children didn't get their books read." You said, "No WONder the CHILdren DIDn't get their BOOKS read," right? To fit Maynard's scheme, you should have mumbled, "No WONder the CHILdren dint GET their books READ," swallowing an entire syllable in "didn't" and shoving a powerful, important noun -- "books" -- furtively under your breath. The whole book is like that.

Of course, cramming some things in and stretching some things out plays an honorable part in the history of American anapestic tetrameter. "Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere" even begins with a dactyl (DUM-da-da) and sticks in a run of iambs (ba-DUM) for the galloping reader to clatter over in haste. But Longfellow knew what he was doing, and it works. Furthermore, Maynard stoops to the most obvious rhymes: "giraffe" and "laugh," "school" and "fool." For every Kolar or Riley, there are dozens of limping Maynards, so read aloud before you buy.

(The little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead, by the way, is not the denizen of some anonymous nursery rhyme, as pretty much everyone thinks. She's a braindaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. See -- even you know one of his poems by heart. Wouldn't Great Grandpa be proud?)
SALON | Jan. 12, 1998

Polly Shulman is a senior editor at Discover magazine.