Shimmy Shake Earthquake: Don't Forget to Dance Poems

Jabar's buoyant sketchlike figures ``Flip it, flop it, / She hip-hop it'' and ``Shimmy shake it'' throughout this snappy collection of 18 poems about dancing. She depicts such assorted characters as a Scottish bagpiper and Russian dancers, and her varied selections include an Apache song, a Langston Hughes poem and a piece of Ogden Nash tomfoolery. Despite the attempt to provide ethnic diversity, however, the tone of the illustrations seems uniform, each pastel-colored page filled with exuberantly happy, wiggly children. Clever endpapers show progressive steps to several dances, and Jabar has inventively illustrated Jack Prelutsky's ``Forty Performing Bananas'' as a school pageant. While not all of the verses translate well into foot-stomping rhythms (as with some of the traditional rhymes), the juxtaposition of verses from Mother Goose to Margaret Mahy and the humorously busy drawings make for an irrepressible invitation to the dance. Ages 4-8. (May)