After Dark Rlb

This fanciful collection of rhymed poems contains a menagerie of zany animals: a zebra who plays a harp, grasshoppers that spread their bedtime quilts on daisies, a mother kangaroo who tells a ``story of derring-do'' about a ``dashing young squire / Who extinguished a fire / With a bucket of Mulligan stew,'' and a ``Portly pigeon, bird-about-town'' who wears a ``turkish towel and dressing-gown.'' First-person narratives and snippets of verse are confusingly interspersed with quatrains; these are sometimes rhymed jarringly. Still, the brightly colored illustrations throughout are imaginative and cheery, such as the scene of elephants beguiled by animal constellations in a midnight sky. Ages 3-7. (Feb.)