by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 10, 2009

"Long Night Moon" has some of the most gorgeous illustrations I've ever seen. When pondering the drawings, Mark Siegel took "many long walks with only the full moon as his guide," according to the book's jacket. There's a dark and mysterious blue night filling the background of many of his drawings. But it sets off the magic of the nighttime glow from speckles of starlight or snow on a fence's rail.

It's intimate and primal - and so is the text by Cynthia Rylant. As Siegel draws the moon lighting a woman silhouetted against a vast blue sky, Rylant's text appears in a very personal cursive. "Long ago Native Americans gave names to the full moons they watched throughout the year," she writes. "Each month had a moon. And each moon had its name...." And the next page is filled with bands of blue sky and moonlit clouds, filling the sky besides a dark tree whose shadow shrouds the hill. "In January the Stormy Moon shines in mist, in ice, on a wild wolf's back..."

A list of the moons for each month would be boring - if Siegel's drawings weren't so spectacular. As Rylant writes about February's snow moon, glowing white and sharp, Siegel draws shimmering ice crystals in the drifts around a tree. There's the paw prints of a deer - and then the deer itself, its breath cold in the purple sky. But in March, the sky is green, and the deer it now just one more shadow on the hillside, as the tiny saplings are lit up by another round full moon. "In March, a Sap Moon rises over melting ponds, sleepy bears, small green trees," Rylant writes. "It tells a promise and a hope."

It's a book without a story, but it captures our universal fascination with the wonder of the moon - along with hints of the passing seasons. In April, the moon lights the head of baby birds. In May, it's a Flower Moon, smiling, "Happy to be here... It is a song." June brings a pink "Strawberry Moon" shimmering on "succulent buds, on crisp new shoots, on quiet, grateful rabbits." Siegel draws in fireflies, and both artist and writer seem to be finding their own poetry.

There's calm fields of hay in August, and raccoons playing in the moonlight in September. ("[A] Coon Moon watches for shining eyes and busy feet, little brown noses in the air. It loves the small night creatures. It shows them a better path...") But ultimately, the poetry isn't just about the seasons, but the very human feelings we have around them.

And in October the moon says goodbye to the falling leaves and to all the migrating birds...

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