cover image Lullaby and Goodnight: Songs and Poems for Babies

Lullaby and Goodnight: Songs and Poems for Babies

. HarperCollins Publishers, $12 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-06-023501-7

An old-fashioned Valentine to the very young, this small-format collection of lullabies features poems culled mainly from traditional songs and turn-of-the-century verses. Plume's (The Bremen-Town Musicians; The Twelve Days of Christmas) selections include regional choices like ``Mockingbird,'' ``Kentucky Babe,'' ``Hush'n'Bye'' and ``Nantucket Lullaby'' as well as old chestnuts like Brahms's ``Lullaby'' and Kipling's ``Seal Lullaby.'' Each page-length poem faces a soothing pastel page inset with one of Plume's trademark soft, colored-pencil drawings. The tone of the book is self-consciously quaint: Thomas Dekker's ``Golden Slumbers'' is juxtaposed with a drawing of a mother at sunset rocking an infant nestled in a carved cradle; the familiar ``Twinkle, twinkle, little star'' accompanies a picture of a girl whose blanket and pajamas are decorated with hearts. Even Plume's nod toward modernity-the inclusion of a New York City skyline to illustrate Norma Farber's noisy ``Manhattan Lullaby''-is nostalgic. Grandparents will be drawn to the heart-shaped drawing of a sleeping baby nestled amid lilies and roses on the book's cover, but the modern toddlers for whom the volume is ostensibly intended may be less enthralled. Ages 3-6. (Sept.)