how to wrap paragraphs around image

hi hope i describe this right..
lets say a post on my blog has more than one paragraph. If it has an accompanying img and I use standard align=left, img will go to the left (of course), and text on the right.
prob is, if the 1st paragraph is smaller than the image, the succeeding paragraph goes beneath the img, causing a big white space to appear between it and the first paragraph.
what to do? i’ve tried float=left same results. or is this an ie issue?
tia!