BLACK SWAN/WHITE CROW

Superb haiku about animals and the weather, preceded with an instructive note about the form—where it comes from, how it's defined, how to write it, how to read it. Harris (July Is a Mad Mosquito, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) makes his haiku a kind of lyrical punchline that holds readers by virtue of its melodic wistfulness as well as by virtue of its cleverness: ``Blue patches of noon—/the crows caw-cawling/on the telephone wire.'' The woodcuts are completely of a piece with the poems. Manson creates spare nature scenes—birds in the fields, clouds in the sky, images that tend toward the abstract—to be pondered along with the words. A beautiful collection to be savored by readers even as it inspires them. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)