I just read another Cybils picture book, although officially Mordicai Gerstein's Dear Hot Dog appears as a finalist in the poetry category. I have to say that I'm very particular about my poetry; I want it to resonate inside my head when I first read it, and then I want to go back and look at the rhythm and meter and rhyme and sound to see how it makes that beautiful sound. I'm not sure that Gerstein's pages hold up to that secondary analysis, but they do reward their first reading.
When I stopped reading his book as a poetry collection and started over from the front to enjoy it as a picture book, I could let myself enjoy his word choices and the interplay between the text and the pictures and the resonant images conjured up throughout. As a picture book, I highly recommend this work. There was no page that I marked as a great poem to save and enjoy for later, or that I thought I should add to my poetry notebook, though.
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