Jonathan Humble

Updated: 1 day ago

Biography
Samples
'Fledge' Reviews
Chasing Clouds reviewed by Steve Whitaker
Review of Sky Surfing: Excellent Adventures in a Poetry Balloon
Blog
Gallery

Biography

Jonathan Humble lives in Cumbria. His work has been published online and in print in a number of magazines and anthologies. He is editor of the Dirigible Balloon, a website of poetry written for children ( https://dirigibleballoon.org ) See https://northernjim.wordpress.com/about-me/ : )

Samples

How Bad It Is How bad it is when every note you play upon the keys sustains the void within the waiting soul; when it is accepted that this flow will not stop and bring an end to all these helpful faces; when your scent assaults my senses like a bludgeon and takes me to a day I want to bury; when an empty chest refuses to give way under the repeated blows of expectation and all experiences in time coalesce into a returning and enduring disappointment. How bad when the abiding thought is that at this point it could get no worse and then to be proved wrong and wrong and wrong.

'Fledge' Reviews

The Safety of Clouds: Fledge By Jonathan Humble Reviewed by Steve Whitaker Literary Editor The Yorkshire Times 24th July 2020 https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/The-Safety-of-Clouds-Fledge-by-Jonathan-Humble Fledge reviewed by Ali Thurm https://alithurm.com/2020/07/30/fledge Fledge reviewed by Greg Freeman https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=105616 Fledge reviewed by Anne Bailey https://www.sphinxreview.co.uk/index.php/1099-jonathan-humble-fledge

Chasing Clouds reviewed by Steve Whitaker

A Skyfall of Verbs: Chasing Clouds - Brilliant Adventures In A Poetry Balloon One of the many intriguing things about Chasing Clouds, a fine new anthology of children’s poems, is the protean capacity of several of its contributors to make connections with adult readers. Which is as it should be: kids are embryonic adults, or rather, adults will retain vestiges of childhood sensibilities throughout life. Harry Potter transcends boundaries of reception precisely because J.K. Rowling has created a universe of magical suggestion that is balm to the need for escape in children of all ages, from eight to eighty. If childhood is a simplified emotional referent, an unformed and unprocessed amalgam of what will follow, then we share this much with it: a proclivity for enchantment and to be moved by the distilled rendering of bonds that we will continue to cherish in perpetuity. Annick Yerem’s affecting reading of our relationship with dogs speaks to anyone, or at least anyone familiar with the unique gift dogs confer. Directed at children, ‘My Dog is a Three-Letter Spell’ brings the simple affirmation, the ‘all joy, all yes’ of canine disposition, towards an intuition most of us will recognise. Yerem’s positioning of the pet’s joyously uncomplicated instinct in the realm of its favoured grub – the ‘tripe valleys’ and ‘sausage mountains’ of its dream-desire – is a prelude to the unconditionally loving transaction of the poem’s final, deliberately separated, lines: ‘My dog is this moment, is present, is a lesson in here. He owes me nothing. I owe him cheese. I owe him joy.’ Beautiful. As, elsewhere is Julie Anna Douglas’ ‘How to Conjure a Poem in Eight Easy Steps’ which, as a numbered introduction to the creative process for children, and a lyrical and metaphor-clotted paean to poetry, acts upon its own mandate. The delicacy and richness of Douglas’ language could not fail to ‘hook’ any passing grown-up. The gift of poetry, just like the gift of cheese that Yerem hopes for her dog, or the grass that Douglas Dunn wished for the concrete-incarcerated Hull flitter in Terry Street, is best inscribed in words whose sibilance we all apprehend: ‘8. Wrap your completed poem in cloud-silk, spun by the seven silver, singing, sprite sisters of the southern skies’. Similarly, where Stephanie Henson’s ‘Ballerina Cherry Tree’ serves as a lesson for children in the art of making convincing metaphors, her poem’s received effect ‘dazzles’ as blindingly as ‘Nature’s choreography’. For as you might expect, and beyond the irresistible thump of rhythm and rhyme, there is a commitment to instruction here - children learn as they are entertained. Whilst the cosmic circularity of American poet, Zaro Weil’s ‘The Wrong Way Round’ telescopes human existence and the trajectory that brought us here in short and precise lines, before rejoining the present on a train journey, Elisabeth Kelly’s dragon in ‘Magic in the Air’ breathes fire into a nascent sense of glorious becoming. Commonly wrapped in metaphor or disguised as fable, the poems may bolster fragile egos, disentangle emotional knots, or affirm the value of difference. In the manner of Larkin’s 'Born Yesterday', Tom Moody’s ‘I Wish’ is a delightful homage to ordinariness, a celebration of self-worth struggling under the poisonous yoke of envy: ‘But I am not the kid he is. I know I’ll never be. I could never be like him. Instead, I’ll be like me.’ Or Paula Thompson’s ‘Elastic Days’ which speaks, pitch-perfectly and in a collusive present-tense, to that sense of endless summer that inheres to long school holidays, of gathered ‘possibilities’ and of doing ‘anything / and nothing’. The fulsome and animated richness of nature in ‘Cutie Fruitie’ by Gaynor Andrews, David Webb’s ‘Look What I’ve Found’ and ‘Spring’s Magic Wings’ by Linda Middleton, encourages close observation of the natural world, as it performs a service to ecology in a wider universe of ignorance and neglect. The simple wonder of Middleton’s achingly musical lyricism is entirely consonant with the spring-like freshness of juvenile experience: ‘Leaves are unfurling, silk threads are whirling – Caterpillar trapeze!’. Chasing Clouds has been assembled and curated by poet and former teacher, Jonathan Humble, whose creation of The Dirigible Balloon - a treasure trove of online children’s poems, and invaluable resource for kids, their parents, and teachers alike – is an acclaimed success. Interspersed with thematically-fitting, and sensitively rendered illustrations by Humble’s daughter, Em, some of the poems in the new anthology play directly into that sense of the fantastical, the absurd and the surreal that most animates, especially, very young children. Which is why it is difficult to separate the idea of rhythm and sustained, seductive metre from performative suggestion. Michael Rosen’s poem of a suitcase with ambitions beyond its functional utility introduces an inexorable earworm of his voice into the aural imagination, which enhances the verse’s easy wit no end (‘Suitcase Poem’). And Carole Bromley, in similar vein of crisp repetition and jaunty metre, lures the reader along the airborne path of the honeybee, telling of instinct and collective endeavour: ‘Honeybee, honeybee movement not sound Tells the others where flowers are found.’ (‘Tell it to the Bees’) The lunar anthropomorphism of Debra Bertulis’ delightful ‘Sonnet Moon’ yields a mirror to her narrator’s delight in words, conferring the power of music in ‘Sweet notes woven like gossamer’, whilst Jacqueline Shirtliff’s unashamedly celebrant ‘Dance of the Stream Sprite’ performs, in a sequence of alternating, alliterative quatrains and couplets, a dizzying pirouette of theme and form whose rhyme is an irrepressible motor: ‘Shuffle through the shady shallows, Leap from log to log, Tango past the tangled brambles, Tiptoe round the bog.’ The sheer vivacity of this eclectic, and widely provenanced, bevy of poems is its own reward. Delivered with the best of intentions – the collection will provide a rich, hitherto untapped, resource for schools, and all profits from sales will be donated to the National Literacy Trust – its appeal is broad, instructive and profoundly entertaining. Not least in the shape of Val Harris’ gorgeous ‘A Skyfall of Verbs’, whose wisdom resides in its power to combine all in its energetic and cumulative enthusiasm for what we used to call ‘doing words’: ‘I smell the sky in an autumn fire As it smokes and wraps Where the swept leaves lie. I feel the air around my head, The breath of the wind And its drawn-out sigh.'

Review of Sky Surfing: Excellent Adventures in a Poetry Balloon

Review by Steve Whitaker (Yorkshire Times) January 2025 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!’ 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 illuminate 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! Steve Whitaker

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.