Life Doesn't Frighten Me.

The universality of fears, whether adult or childhood, is attested to in this combination of 16 plates by Jean-Michel Basquiat with Maya Angelou's poem "Life Doesn't Frighten Me." Pairing Angelou's reassuring poem with Basquiat's unsettling, childlike images was a stroke of genius. In fact the correspondence between the two artists is so close that this book reads as if the 1978 text were composed in direct response to Basquiat's art. For a children's book, it is surprisingly acute in its manifestations of fear, and even though the poem always returns to its matter-of-fact refrain, "Life doesn't frighten me at all," some of its word/image combinations are calculatedly harsh. A jagged 1981 drawing of three fenced-in animal figures, for example, is accompanied by the line "Mean old Mother Goose/Lions on the loose," suggesting an adult world spun out of control, while the pair of Basquiats picked to illustrate the lines "Panthers in the park/Strangers in the dark" reach toward more hidden, half-formed fears that prey on the imagination.

As a tool for teaching children to articulate their fears in order to confront them, the value of such a book to parents and teachers is no doubt immense. But its bonus value is as an art book for adults, since it provides a poignant reminder of the same kinds of fears that Basquiat's paintings could never quite assuage in the heart of their creator, and in so doing underscores the tragedy of his premature death.