Consider the Lemming

As with the best of Ogden Nash's verses, Jeanne Steig's poems surprise and amuse with clever wordplay and wry humor. Rhythmic and funny, the poems aptly consider not only the lemming (``No hawing and hemming'') but a variety of animals, both real and imagined. The beaver, for example, shown taking down a totem pole, ``can gnaw through a tree / While you pour the Chablis. / He's a consummate overachiever.'' Of ``Big Snakes,'' the reader is told that ``It doesn't pay to get too fonda / Your python or your anaconda.'' The mole is ``such a misanthropic soul'' that he ``tunnels blindly in the earth / and nothing knows of warmth or mirth.'' There are quips, puns and delicious rhymes throughout, matched in spirit by William Steig's witty pen-and-ink drawings that end with a shark's ``Fin.'' A wily collaboration of two very kindred spirits. Michael di Capua Books. All ages. (May)