Emile and the Field

Poets, with their gifts for compression, rhythm, and (sometimes even these days) rhyme, would seem like natural picture-book writers, and Young, the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the new director of the Smithsonian's African American museum, sure is. In his debut for kids he captures the lonely wonder of a curious child in nature with a spare, slyly rhythmic beauty that, along with Ebinama's warmly pensive watercolors, make his Emile a sweet successor to Ezra Jack Keats's Peter, both of them making their angels in the snow. (Age 2 to 5)