Poems and drawings capture spirit of kids. - Detroit Free Press (Detroit, MI)

Byline: Cathy Collison

This is a great time to head to the library and check out poetry. We salute poets during the month of April, and this week is Young People's Poetry Week. It's also National Library Week.

Your family will enjoy reading aloud Dean Koontz's poems about everyday life, fun and fantasy. 'The Paper Doorway: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse' (HarperCollins, $17.95), which focuses on kids' lives and their senses of humor, is one of the best collections we've seen recently. There are poems that talk about daydreaming in class, poems with silly rhymes and fun like the 'Shark in the Park,' poems about food and poems about pretending to be sick. The black-and-white drawings by Phil Parks of Royal Oak are wonderful in detail and capture the quirky and silly spirit.

'Splash: Poems of Our Watery World' by Constance Levy (Orchard Books, $16.95) celebrates everything to do with water _ from dewdrops to icebergs.

If your student is into sports, 'Way to Go! Sports Poems' by Lillian Morrison (Boyds Mill, $16.95) celebrates all kinds of sports and is handily organized into categories, including 'Waith a Ball' and 'On Wheels.' It also would be helpful if a child has poetry homework and wants to pick a sports theme.

'The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East' is an interesting collection of poems selected by Natomi Shihab Nyew, a writer and editor. Middle school readers and their teachers may want to share these. At the end are notes about the poets.

A guide for parents as much as students is 'Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out' by Ralph Fletcher (HarperCollins, $4.95 paperback). This is a homework helper or tool for young people interested in learning to write poetry.

Jack Prelutsky is a poet for every age. Your elementary school student can share his rhymes with siblings in 'The Frogs Wore Red Suspenders' (HarperCollins, $16.95). Illustrator Petra Mathers catches the spirit of Prelutsky.

What's a poetry jam? Young readers can find out in 'Wham! It's A Poetry Jam' by Sara Holbrook. (Boyds Mill, $9.95) Poetry jams, by the way, are somewhat like performance art. In some schools, classes have entered competitions. The book explains contests and how your class could perform a jam session with poetry. There are group poem ideas, advice on techniques and more than 30 poems to practice.

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