Books in First Poetry Series series

Ron Koertge’s Yellow Moving Van is a collection of relaxed and buoyant and sometimes very funny poems that address Desi & Lucy with the same courtesy as Walt Whitman. The author celebrates his roots in the Mid-West and a few pages later stops off in Transylvania. These poems like to sometimes embrace and sometimes confound expectations, and they all stand together as enemies of the murky and pompous. There is apparently no subject -- Prometheus, a fifty foot woman, or Death himself -- that is unwilling to fall under his spell.

These beautifully illustrated books, now reissued with all new 4-color covers, present the best of what's new in poetry, carefully chosen for children between the ages of 8 and 13. Many of the poems were written especially for these volumes, and among the poets included are Roald Dahl, Grace Nichols, Judith Viorst, Jack Prelutsky, David McCord. Foster provides a variety of themes with strong associations for children: from the fun and light-hearted (Vampires, Pets, and Holidays) to the provocative (One-Parent Families, Technology, and War). Drawings, cartoons and photographs--most in color--draw attention to every page.

The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times-his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness. Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventeenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.