Animals great and small, real and imaginary sprawl across Rogers's vigorous, spread-filling, eye-filling watercolors in this wild and woolly successor to Monster Soup and Other Spooky Poems (1992). Evans opens with a poem of her own, sending a joyous eight-year-old out to celebrate his birthday by searching for the perfect pet. He considers James Reeves's ``The Doze'' (``Through Dangly Woods the aimless Doze/A-dripping and a-dribbling goes''), then a yak, a pterodactyl, a bat, a monkey, an ant, a mud-loving ``Mudgimu,'' and others, who appear in poems by Marilyn Singer, Theodore Roethke, May Swenson, et al. At last he settles on Issa's puppy, sleeping in the long grass ``with a leaf stuck in his mouth.'' With just 14 poems, including the one on the endpapers, this is a slender gathering, but the selections vary nicely in tone and level of discourse, and the illustrations expand upon the pieces with exuberance. (Picture book/poetry. 6-9)