Let's get one thing straight: Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite writers. His novel _Something Wicked This Way Comes_ is one of my personal favorites. I have read Bradbury stories aloud to live audiences, and performed a couple of them from memory as well.But Bradbury is not much of a poet. On the spectrum from Eliot and Stevens down to McKuen, he comes much closer to the latter. Bradbury writes rich, poetic prose which works as such most of the time, but his poems are rarely more than mildly interesting or pretty thought-rambles.
So it is with "Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas," a Hallmark-card-ish tribute to our lively four-footed friends. The illustrations by Louise Reinoehl Max are nice enough, but hardly inspired.
What makes this inexpensive bauble collectible for Bradbury completists (which includes me -- I ordered one from Amazon, after all), or perhaps for people who are VERY sentimental about canines, is the introduction, which includes a story about a boyhood trauma relating to a dog, and the lifelong effects.
I'm glad to have a copy to add to my collection, but I doubt I'll ever open it again.
