Picture-Perfect Poetry

THE BILL MARTIN JR. BIG BOOK OF POETRY Edited by Bill Martin Jr. Illustrated by Various Artists Simon & Schuster. $21. (ages 4 to 8)

This substantial compendium has all the hallmarks of a classic: satisfyingly fat (175 pages), beautifully illustrated (by 13 different artists), thick paper, spacious lay-outs, sturdy binding, plus three separate indexes and a table of contents. All this would be for naught, however, without first-rate selections. Luckily, the late Bill Martin handpicked a bouquet of verses ranging from solemn to serious, lyrical to laughable, and classic to contemporary. The poems are arranged in 10 sections -- animals, nature, feelings, food, nonsense and so on -- making it easy to dip in and out as time permits and interests dictate. Lois Ehlert's and Ashley Bryan's cut-paper collages are eye-popping, Nancy Tafuri's gentle watercolors add a contemplative note, and Steven Kellogg's silly pen-and-ink illustration for "The Folk Who Live in Backward Town" will have young readers running to the nearest mirror to figure out what's going on. Parents will find this perfect for intergenerational sharing as they rediscover old favorites (Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti) and encounter contemporary gems (Mary Ann Hoberman, Judith Viorst). A couple of blunders mar this otherwise solid production: The flap oversells itself by claiming "almost two hundred" poems" (there are 123), and two of the indexes (titles and first lines) omit the first poem in the book.

VOICE FROM AFAR Poems for Peace By Tony Johnston Illustrated by Susan Guevara Holiday House. $16.95. (ages 8-12)

In this collection of 26 poems, a small plastic shoe serves as a reminder that, in the midst of war, life can slip away from a body as easily as a shoe falls from a foot. Tony Johnston's visceral images are set against Susan Guevara's dream-like paintings in which figures emerge and recede in a haze of dust and smoke. Given the vivid subject matter, the style serves as a welcome scrim between readers and reality, allowing the power of the poems to take center stage. A grandmother in Belfast walks out fearlessly into an empty street -- oblivious to snipers "bristling in the dark" -- and covers the body of a boy with "a red shawl she had woven." A sister tells her little brother a story in which their house lifts into the sky, floating away from the approaching tanks, and they are safe "in thin air." Readers will see a world filled with hunger, hurt and grief, but it is not a world without hope. A boy kicks a red ball back and forth with a soldier ("Nobody knows the game -- except the ball."); a white goat nibbles leaves in an olive grove ("Let us follow the white goat home"); and just when you believe that all the birds have flown, "you hear a tiny eggshell sound. Like a dime/dropped into a blind man's cup."

MY PEOPLE By Langston Hughes Photographs by Charles R. Smith Jr. Atheneum. $17.99. (ages 4 to 8) THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS By Langston Hughes Illustrated by E. B. Lewis Disney/Jump at the Sun Books. $16.99 (ages 6 to 10)

Although both of these poems originally appeared in the Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, in 1923 and were reprinted in Hughes's first collection, The Weary Blues, in 1926, they seem to speak directly to young readers today. These breathtakingly beautiful new editions ensure that Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes's words will reverberate for a whole new generation. Although My People combines (and recombines) a mere 15 words -- "The night is beautiful,/So the faces of my people./The stars are beautiful,/So the eyes of my people" -- Hughes's powerful tribute sings with both admiration and joy. Charles Smith Jr. has chosen to illustrate these deeply felt sentiments with photographs that focus tightly on the utterly ordinary but strikingly beautiful faces and hands of his subjects: a baby laughing, a mother gazing at her child, a young man closing his eyes to enter an inner world. With this book, readers will understand what Hughes understood almost a century ago: Life, in all its variety, is itself a work of art.

In The Negro Speaks of Rivers, illustrator E. B. Lewis also focuses on hands, faces and feet, but he uses watercolors to capture as well the path of sunlight across a wide river, the watery interplay of waves along a beach, even the cracked clay bottom of a wadi gone to dust. In the stunning self-portrait that accompanies the line "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," painter and poet seem, for a moment, to have merged, awed by the power of this primal element, humbled by its beauty.

Kristi Jemtegaard is the youth services coordinator for Arlington Public Library.