Dear Reader,

All of these favorite books of mine are illustrated poems. When I was a child, I loved hearing my mother read the poems in A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I wrote my first picture book after having my first baby. It's a lullaby called Close Your Eyes, and it came to me naturally with rhythm and rhyme. "Close your eyes, and you can be / sound asleep in an apple tree."

Rhyme is verbal music, and writing it is like writing a song. If you can, memorize poems so you can say them aloud for people. Some day, maybe you will say them for your own children.

Happy Rhythm and Rhyme,
Jean Marzollo