Five Finger-Piglets

Another beautifully-produced, humorously illustrated and inventively titled hard-back collection of teasing poems published by Macmillan. Five Finger Piglets, with more than 50 poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, Roger McGough, Gareth Owen and Brian Patten, follows One of Your Legs is Both the Same; Another Day on Your Foot And I Would Have Died and We Couldn't Provide Fish Thumbs. A line from Carol Ann Duffy's delightful poem, "Chocs", in which a child's small hand--five finger-piglets--surreptitiously rifles the layers of someone else's box of chocolates, ("tough luck, Anne Pope") gives the collection its title and is a terrific example of the uniformly high standard of poems by these five well-established writers. There's something for every taste and every mood here, ("The Going Pains", "The Kleptomaniac", "Life as a Sheep"), and whether they are three lines or three pages long the poems all tickle the imagination and delight the mind. (Ages 7 to 11) --Tamsin Palmer