The Dark Gnu and Other Poems

Wendy Videlock’s The Dark Gnu and Other Poems plays, jokes, teaches, admonishes, yields to the ecstatic, and strays into the shadowy where “If not for the dark, / no / spark.” All of this is heightened by striking full-color illustrations from the author herself. There are stories that come and go in a couple of blinks, and stories that linger and juggle their way from hut to the market, to the fair, on a “swaying dappled mare,” to get to all the good to be had or done. Mother Goose, myth, ...