Please, Mr Crocodile!

This full colour, picture book format collection contains some twenty poems featuring animals wild and domestic, large and small in many different habitats. Each one reads aloud well and there is a wide variety of styles and moods: the playground rhyme 'Please, Mr Crocodile!', Joan Horton's bold, direct description of 'Grey Squirrel' as it urgently stocks up food for winter, scary humour in Lord Alfred Douglas's 'The Shark', the nightmare world lurking in Richard Edwards's 'Our Pond', a stark contrast to the 'ittery, skittery' word playing 'Water Striders' - a brilliant poem to inspire dance as is Ann Whitford Paul's 'Baboon'. There is awe, wonder and humility too with Joan Cass's tiger or Frank Collymore's spider. Moran's paintings of the flora and fauna are well observed, enclosing, extending but never overwhelming the poet's work - fine balance indeed. Interestingly her illustration for Brian Patten's 'Warm Paws' features a rabbit: try reading the poem aloud to children without showing them the illustration and asking them to form their own image: what do they see? For me, the splendid 'Grey Owl', the final poem in the book, sums up the resonant power poetry can have, 'fanning the margins of the mind'.