YOU'RE INVITED TO BRUCE LANSKY'S POETRY PARTY!

This illustrated collection of five dozen short verses—on family, pets, school, disasters, advice—reveals a ham-fisted approach to rhyming, with odes to belching, the fried monkey meat, flatulence, barfing, and dogs peeing in the garden. Sophomoric humor has its place; the problem here is that the verse doesn't scan, and is utterly forgettable, e.g., ``My baby sister's/really swell./I love her smile,/but not her smell,'' or, worse, wooden: ``The winner for attendance/is Mary Anne McKay./She came to school on every day/of Christmas holiday.'' In the introduction, Lansky writes, ``In schools, I recite my own poems, as well as those of Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky . . . If you expose children to the most entertaining children's poems ever written, they just might like poetry.'' Exactly how he fits into the picture isn't quite clear. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)