cover image Earth Songs

Earth Songs

Myra Cohn Livingston. Holiday House, $14.95 (27pp) ISBN 978-0-8234-0615-9

Like the previous Sky Songs and Sea Songs from the same collaborators, this picture book celebrates the beauty of the physical world. The poet asks the ""Little O, small earth'' to ``say its secrets,'' and the earth answers with an invitation to explore its surfaces: ``Patched together/With land and sea,/ I am earth,/ Great earth./ Come with me!'' Reader and poet see mountains ``chained in deep folds,/molded in waves that sleep, wrinkled and old.'' They visit the ``dashing, plashing'' rivers and the canyons that ``deep sleep in stone walls, black, silent and steep.'' Fisher's majestic paintings bring drams to such descriptions as the ``red mouth'' of a volcano and the round O of earth surrounded by a golden halo of light in a star-flecked sky. This book will challenge the minds and enrich the vision of its young readers. (4-8)