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At first glance, Black, White and Shades of Poetry by Gloria Duva DiRicco Knapp might appear to be amateurish. It can seem like singsong, grade school level poetry. But that's before the reader starts to notice that in her love for the ordinary, Gloria closes some very surprising circuits of recognition for us. In 'I'll Put You In My Will',for example, Gloria soliloquizes with her son "It's tough out there, Without your folks, And you won't get by, With knock-knock jokes". Her voice in these poems reflects Hopkins visions that 'there lives the dearest freshness deep down things',even,for Gloria and her readers, things as ordinary as a street in Paterson, New Jersey and the family she grew up in. Gloria also displays not a little of the whimsy of Ogden Nash and some of the playful inventiveness of Dr. Seuss ---------- Jim Doran, M.A.