Bird, String, Cricket.

Portland, Maine:: Rebecca Goodale,, 2012.. Edition of 3. 6 x 6"; 18 unnumbered pages. Handmade paper folded into 5 French-folded signatures sewn onto two straps. Handcolored collagraphs and velvet flowers tell the wordless story. Banded with button and thread closure. Rebecca Goodale has been documenting the extinct and endangered flora and fauna of Maine since 1999. Her books in this area, as Nicholas Schroeder said in a review of her exhibition Lullaby, "vivify, celebrate, and elaborate them, often with poetic flourishes, rich metaphor, and abundance of color. Their surfaces mirror her subjects' habitats, and the rhythm of their bindings borrows from their intricate and animate patterns."  Once in a while she diverts from the specific theme of extinct and endangered to produce a playful book still with the theme of flora and fauna. Bird, String, Cricket is such a book. It is a playful book with bright colors and velvet flowers — a bird, a string, and a cricket.