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Children's Book Review: Sky Surfing: Adventures In A Poetry Balloon
Nothing is better calculated to contradict a critical adult view of a children’s poetry anthology than the small person at whom the book is aimed. To pick at the seams of the poems themselves with obtuse gusto is to overlook the precious relationship between author and child, whose value may consist entirely in the recognition of sound, or the simple pleasure to be derived from animation of the senses on encountering rhyme. What the hapless reviewer may intuit as formal deficiency is irrelevant to this special case: speculation as to how the poems might perform their transformative magic on the juvenile imagination is the most memorable arbiter of a collection’s worth.
And the new volume from Dirigible Balloon, collated and edited by the indefatigable Jonathan Humble, is a triumph of range and depth, perceptively contrived to appeal to kids of all ages. From rollicking sleigh-rides of sound and rhythm whose unashamed mandate is to win over the youngest of readers, to the sensory slapstick of the immediate moment; from the simple but subtle insinuation of an ecological message of hope, to an encouragement to dream unfettered, Humble’s thoughtful curation of this, his second collection, gently educates as it entertains the young mind. Timed, in a renewed collaboration with Yorkshire Times Publishing, to appear at Christmas, the slim volume is a shoe-in for the kiddie bookshop and the library but most of all, for the receptive imagination.
Giving a platform to previously unpublished poets alongside established names - it is to the editor’s credit that Michael Rosen, Colin West and Carole Bromley, amongst many others, are all enthusiastic contributors to
Skysurfing - the selection of poems is nothing if not eclectic. Reasoning that pictorial images make an indispensable accompaniment to the poems, Humble has persuaded the internationally renowned illustrator, Chris Riddell, and several other artists, to transform the anthology fittingly, in cartoon, pastiche and caricature, but also in beautiful representations of the themes they describe.
For the very young, the book is a treasure trove of easy rhyme and joyous recognition: the delicious absurdity of John Dredge’s ‘My Silly Friend’ with an equally deft, and daft, illustration by Fred Blunt, finds a pithy neighbour in Colin West’s ‘Ouch!’, whose concise quatrain tells a child all he or she needs to know about the ‘pain’ of misplaced Lego. Words circuitously rendered in satisfying conjunctions, tongue-licking sibilance and tongue-twisting vowel sounds run pleasingly on the ear: Eleanor Brown’s presentiment of Spring is an awakening, an affirmation in full rhyme:
‘Kites jet-streaming
Woodlice teeming
Frogspawn gleaming
Spiders scheming
Silk-lines streaming
Summer dreaming’. (‘Must be Spring’)
If Lesley James’ serpentine ‘Don’t Just Walk!’ is an alliterative incitement to physical expression, to ‘leap, lollop, lunge’, and Kathryn Beevor’s ‘Snake’ imitates the stealthy slither of its namesake into the peace of a ‘Cornish cottage / Garden’, then Fiona Halliday’s ‘Trickling Ideas’ artfully describes our natural reluctance to sit quietly and contemplate the creative impulse, in a rhythmically energetic catalogue of the humdrum alternatives:
‘Pootling, doodling, mooching in the house,
Scurrying, hurrying, squeaking like a mouse,
Prancing, dancing, performing arabesques,
How many ways to avoid sitting at our desks.’
In similar vein, Ian Brownlie’s clever acrostic defines an ‘Earworm’ in terms of the unbidden nature of its presence: the ‘Repeated phrases no-one chose’ are doomed to their own poetic repetition, fixed in a loop as the verse’s own earworm is amplified into an infinity of fading grey. If the phenomenon it contemplates speaks to adult experience, ‘The Worm’ is not misplaced in a premonitory children’s book. The repetition of words and phrases that inhere like glue to the juvenile thought process, encouraging a dialectic of song and play and inspiring the creative impulse, are ubiquitous here. Attie Lime’s poem of hope in a sometimes hopeless world reifies, draws closer even, the possibility of redemption in a sweet teleology of phrases whose collective accretion finds a home for the addressee, perhaps the reader, in the halcyon picture postcard of the poem’s title, a place…
‘where mountains are taller
where smiles are wider
where worries are smaller.’ (‘Wish You Were Here’)
The poem immediately following - Sarah Ziman’s ‘I Am Not in the Mood Today’ - almost reverses the conceit in a gesture of capitalised defiance, as the narrator/child, persuasively rendered in Em Humble’s accompanying illustration, shakes his fist at an unresponsive audience. Ziman’s repeated use of the contraction ‘DON’T’ to describe the child’s intransigent mood is as splendidly apt as he is mercurial… as mercurial, in fact, as the multi-skilled grandmatriarch of Rhona Stephens’ energetic and thoroughly entertaining quatrains in ‘Knitty Gritty Granny’.
Words. The impulse of kids to jump about in puddles as if to recreate the leg-soaking backwash of passing cars is convincingly realised in Jessica Milo’s ‘Splishy Splashy Day’, whose delightful onomatopoeias celebrate the simple joy of mucking about:
‘Kick, splash,
skip, stomp,
laugh, squeal,
jump, PLOMP!’
![Illustration credit Chris Riddell]()
Illustration credit Chris Riddell
There is a kind of loose but integrated order to Jonathan Humble’s process of curation: poems are often located in (vague) thematic or semantic groups. The puddles that are so often the focus of the child’s attention become seas and oceans elsewhere in this fine, metaphor-laden collection, along with animated odysseys across land, sea and sky. From Philip Ardagh’s temporal journey conceived through the prism of a thrown sand pebble (‘A Forgotten Pebble in a Pocket’), to Shaun Jex’s imperious quatrains in ‘The Sea of Stories’, whose sense of purpose, wrapped in the power of the imagination to cross figurative oceans, might itself be a grand metaphor for the aim of
Sky Surfing, the poems look ever upwards. Chris Riddell’s wonderful accompanying drawing – a Viking boat on the high seas - encapsulates the sense of unrestricted freedom that Jex’s final, rhythmical, lines articulate in words:
‘Come sail, come sail along with me
Where tales like breakers grow
Come sail the Sea of Stories
As the winds begin to blow’.
And if Gaynor Andrews’ balloon-borne cat peers down over a turning earth’s lands and oceans from the perspective of an empty sky, buoyed on the thermals of delightful alternating rhymes (‘The Travelling Cat’), then Rachel Burrows’ fond meditation on the sea, growing-up and the imagination in ‘Orcadia’ is a gorgeous metaphor-clotted antidote to inertia. The effect is repeated in Zaro Weil’s simple paean to natural continuity as a seashell’s history and progress through the waves, across the reef and over the strand, is harvested in the narrator’s imagination (‘Barefoot on the Beach’). The carefree unanchoring of Felicity Teague’s ‘Sail Away’, with its resonant image of happy seals and a sea-bound yacht provided by Carrie Karnes-Fannin, is a gentle and empathic encouragement, delivered in eight Lear-like verses, to cast cares away in the protean indifference of the ocean’s drift.
The temporal resilience of Weil’s seashell endures in the several poems here that reflect on our earth and our duty of care to ensure its survival, and it is here, as we hand on the baton to succeeding generations, that the relevance of our natural world’s currency to children is made especially pressing. In poems that gently steer kids towards the light, a single line in Michael Rosen’s ‘Monday is …’ – ‘Saturday is make it matter day’ - might almost stand as an incentive to us all to try and make a difference. The symbiotic relationship enjoyed by the narrator and her subject in Karla Kane’s ‘The Corvid Queen’, with its rapturous illustration by Jason Chapman, is a consummation devoutly to be wished, an admirable conflation of human and animal instinct in harmonious conjunction:
‘Don’t speak each other’s language
but it really doesn’t matter.
Communicating perfectly
we dance and laugh and chatter.’
Bernard Pearson’s delightfully witty ‘Doings’ yields a comic counterpoint to the poems that immediately precede it: ‘I Love You Earth’ is no more and no less than the homage it describes - Jacoby Crane’s powerful couplets declare an open-hearted affiliation with all that he surveys in an act, almost, of oblation before the beauties of the natural world, whilst Melinda Szymanik’s poignant and spare lineage in ‘Tree’ gives up an anthropomorphic corrective to our despoliation of the arboreal world in absorption of its energy:
‘My inhale
is your exhale,
your green
is my relief’.
To dream unrestrained is, or should lie within, the gift of all children. Gillian Spiller’s wonderfully ingenuous celebration of taking the imaginative brakes off in ‘Building my Dreams’, offers a kind of blueprint for some of the poems that follow: from the distilled and metaphorically condensed air- and sea-borne ‘flight’ of Kit Weston’s ‘The Day the Clouds Swam Away’, to the shape-shifting metamorphosis of Brian Moses’ ‘Learning To Fly’, and Carole Bromley’s lunar ‘Dream’, the child is immersed, encouraged to glide through the ‘Ballet of the sky’. The effect is repeated in Susan Andrews’ ‘Daydream’ and ‘Brave a Wingbeat’ by Linda Middleton, who captures the languid motion of an albatross in flight with consummate attention to rhythm:
‘Brave a wingbeat and fly one more,
Swallow swirling until you’re sure.’
And we shouldn’t forget the human connection: Laura Cooney’s ‘How to Bake a Mummy’ perceives maternal love, care and attention through the prism of the act of cake-making, whilst Jack Wheeler’s narrator’s jolly romp through a figurative fancy-dress drawer brings forth a fully-fledged pirate in the guise of his dad, and in the company of a fabulously articulated illustration by Steve May.
Emma Purshouse’s moving elegy of not forgetting, a delicate reminder to the young, is rendered in the repeated phrasing of ‘remembers’, a back-draught, an inventory of an earlier universe whose details iluminate memory. This world of ‘evacuees’ and guns ‘louder than thunder’ is insinuated into the child’s present, as presciently and with as much sensory appeal as Christmas.
And it is oddly fitting that ‘Because their war was not so long ago…’ should precede the closing section of
Sky Surfing, a group of poems that focus on winter and the festive season. The ‘morningsharp air’ of Annelies Judson’s frozen ‘Moment’ performs the impossible in crystallizing evanescence, as Julie Stevens’ fine poem conjures, in the linear economy of four tercets, a sense of silent expectancy:
‘Roads parked memories
Engines purred low,
Lights turned cold.’ (‘When the World Went to Sleep’)
Perhaps best of all, as our own landscape is currently frozen into submission, that we should find Helen Dineen’s glorious slip and slide ‘Through the Snow’ almost at the end of this upbeat, effortlessly affirming, anthology:
‘A crackling fire, a cosy throw.
Warming drinks and treats for all’.
What more could we ask!
Sky Surfing : Adventures in a Poetry Balloon, Edited by Jonathan Humble is published by Yorkshire Times Publishing (2024).
Sky Surfing : Adventures in a Poetry Balloon will be available through the Dirigible Balloon website.
Read Andrew Palmer's interview with Jonathan Humble:
Humbled By Poetry