Absolutely Wild

The publisher first saw Kim Cunningham's artwork - and her father's clever and witty poetry - at an exhibition of New Hampshire artists near the company's warehouse in Peterborough. With two young children and bookcases brimming over with alphabet, animal, nonsense, and every other kind of children's book, it takes a lot to impress him. This work did; even an amateur could see at a glance that here was the Real Thing - both the rhymes and the images.

The verses by her father, a New York copywriter, are original, catchy, and sophisticated (or as sophisticated as you can get writing about vultures, gibbons, giraffes, and gnus). Here's just a sample of Webster's ode to the yak:

A shaggy species is the yak
With hairy front and hairy back.
It isn't very hard to spot him
With hairy top and hairy bottom

He doesn't mind that he's so shaggy
If he wore pants, he'd like them baggy
His coat's a frightful mess, and yet
You'd dress as he does, in Tibet.

Below and beside here are some of Cunningham's prime specimens along with one verbal sidekick. If you are intrigued by the exotic, the colorful, the sublimely ridiculous, or the reductively sublime, this is a book to tickle your tailfeathers.

THE SNAIL
The snail's a funny little fellow
Whose body seems to run on Jell-o.
He slips and slides along the ground
And never makes the slightest sound.
He only has one foot, and so
His speed is very, very slow.
Still, moving at all is hard, you know,
When you carry your house wherever you go.