Ring Out, Wild Bells: Poems About Holidays and Seasons - Hardcover

Kindergarten-Grade 6-- In this uneven anthology of 75 poems, Hopkins has retrieved a number of entries (not necessarily the strongest) from his holiday collections of the 1970's ( Easter Buds Are Springing 1979; o.p. , Sing Hey for Christmas Day! 1975; o.p., Hey-How for Halloween 1974 , Beat the Drum 1977; o.p. , Moments 1980; o.p., all HBJ) and added more of the same. There are a handful of good selections by Carl Sandburg, e.e. cummings, Norma Farber, Sandra Liatsos, Karla Kuskin , and Myra Cohn Livingston mixed with some rather uninspiring rhymes by Joan Walsh Anglund, Bobbi Katz, Fran Haraway, Margaret Hillert, and others. The design, with Baumann's flat, decorative drawings appearing alternately in full-color and black-and-white, is attractive and inviting. Although occasionally too literal (as in a series of stairs decorating Langston Hughes's poem ``Mother to Son''), the illustrations more often restate the ideas of the poems in pleasant and appropriate ways. --Ann Stell, The Smithtown Library, NY
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