The Wizard consists of a brief rhyming poem about sorcery that first appeared in Prelutsky’s 1976 book, Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep. Now there’s The Wizard, a picture book based on the time-honored literary principle that Maureen Dowd has described as: “Never sell once what you can sell twice.” Early in 2007 Prelutsky served up uninspired sports poems in Good Sports. Two of his worst books have come out since the Poetry Foundation named him the children’s poet laureate of the U.S., a title unrelated to the honor conferred by the Library of Congress. You know that how critics say that there’s a curse of the Nobel that keeps writers from doing great work after they become laureates, which Gabriel García Marquez beat with Love in the Time of Cholera? Jack Prelutsky seems to suffer from a similar jinx. The Wizard is the only picture book that a bookstore clerk has ever tried to talk me out buying. HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 32 pp., $16.99. A popular children’s poet casts no spell when he recycles earlier material
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