Song of the Night: Moonlight by Helen V. Griffith

RABBIT HIDES IN THE SHADOW.

Rabbit may be concealed in the shadow of the lowering twilight, but as he watches, the full moon soon steeps everything else in aglorious yellow wash. Moonlight slides, skips, skids, scatters, and spatters the scene, mountains, rocks, and trees, seeping like melted butter over everything in view.

Noted author Helen V. Griffith's Moonlight (Greenwillow, 2012) is a soothing and sibilant tone poem to the night, and illustrator Laura Dronzek provides a palette of blue, gray, and black tones in sumptuous, fulsome acrylics. Her landscapes, gilded by the golden flow of moonlight, pair perfectly with the music of Griffith's text. Griffith likens the moonlight to melted butter, warm and sweet, as it coats everything with the flavor of the night, and Dronzek's artwork shimmers with its glow.

Rabbit is first lulled to drowse and dream by this moonlight, but as its beams flow into the opening of his cozy burrow, he wakens and rouses, slipping out to skip under its golden spell:

RABBIT DANCES IN THE FIELD.

BUTTER ON HIS HEAD.

Griffith, author of other acclaimed poetic prose titles such as Georgia Music, and Grandaddy's Stars has in her new Moonlight (Greenwillow, 2012), a beautifully written and illustrated bedtime book, one which teaches the theory of the extended metaphor without even trying.