ODDHOPPER OPERA

Cyrus (The Mousery, 2000, etc.) promises bugs and verses, and delivers plenty of both in this ground-level view of a vegetable garden's teeming residents. Depicting every creature from beetles, flies, snails, and spiders to the occasional snake ("Through the tangle, softly gliding, / Comes a long, long tummy sliding . . . ") or bird with delicious realism, he introduces such appealing characters as a confused young frog who wonders where his tail went, Mama Pitter-Patter-Pede with her "half a hundred legs," and a squad of industrious dung beetles: “ 'Papa, O Papa Bug, what will we eat?' / 'It's gummy, it's yummy, it's dung! What a treat.' ” The poems are distinct but untitled, connected both by common characters and by such running jokes as a season-long snail race, and a string of woozy ants that bonk heads to communicate. With no sacrifice of legibility, the page design is inventive too, with poems and pictures ingeniously wrapped together and occasional lines of text snaking along stems or through ground litter. Two-legged fans of Douglas Florian's Insectlopedia (1998) and J. Patrick Lewis's The Little Buggers (1998) will scurry after this verbal and visual tour-de-force. (Poetry. 7-10)