"Gaugin's original illustrations are attractively rendered in black-line cartoon style with splotches of light green, royal blue, aquamarine, pumpkin, and mustard. The book's appealing cover will engage children, and the poems might prompt them to create their own silly rhymes.-School Library Journal, starred review. The combination of handwritten, informal verse and Paul Rene Gauguin's avant garde illustrations has proven to be an irresistible and endlessly delightful combination for children and adults alike. Alive with sound, shape, and color, Hagerup's children's poems are still known by heart by every Norwegian child and collections of her poetry can be found on every child''s bookshelf.

Following last season's Little Parsley, this new Hagerup volume was first published in Norway in 1971. At the time, it was a literary scandal for offering free verse to children, who were best suited, as the critics claimed, to the orderly rhymes of established poetic forms. Time and the inherently free and wild forms of youthful imagination have proven the critics completely wrong. Gorgeously illustrated by Paul Rene Gauguin, with his most antic line, as well as hand lettered, and playfully translated by Beck Crook, this collection of Hagerup poems is pure pleasure.