Keepers

From School Library Journal Grade 1-3-A collection of poems about moments and objects that linger in children's memories. Rand's gloriously colorful paintings anchor the poems solidly in one moment in time-readers sit with a boy in a boat as he struggles to remove a fishhook ("I worked the metal from/his lip, and with my finger/stroked his head/and wished that I could slip/him overboard/but didn't dare"); walk into the woods "where little wispy things/in gown and hood/slide down the dark/and fold their wings"; and swing through the night sky on a silver trapeze. Some poems miss the mark-children may not wonder about real skeleton keys ("do they rattle around whenever they please/Is that why they call them skeleton keys?") or lament the loss of a father's gift ("and if I had a uke today/I don't suppose that I could/play the thing at all"), but most of the poems and paintings, like those in Charlotte Huck's Secret Places (Greenwillow, 1993), do speak to the experiences and imaginings of young people.