Snap! –Poems for Children
- barbarableiman
- Jul 8
- 2 min read
In May 2023 an email turned up in my inbox from a man called Jonathan Humble, the editor of a children’s poetry website called The Dirigible Balloon. Yes, he did want to publish my poem, ‘Supper Time’ and it was a ‘lovely’ poem. Lovely. What a thrill hearing that word! Up until then my only audience had been my 4-year-old grandson and my family – the grown-ups who heard me reading my poems to him. He was an enthusiastic, joyful listener and his laughter was like a drug. I couldn’t get enough of the fix of watching what a poem could do for him.
But with my first published poem a new, bigger world opened up. I started publishing more on The Dirigible Balloon, joined an amazing online workshop, the Poetry Society ZigZag Stanza, met lots of brilliant children’s poets and learnt about magazines, competitions and publishing opportunities from them. At the ZigZag workshops, I discovered more about how to craft poems for children – up to this point I’d been writing fiction for adults or Young Adults. At one of my first workshops, it was a revelation to be given the suggestion that I should play with the layout on the page. How could I have taught literature and poetry for so long, and been so attuned to the look of poems, and then be so conservative about experimentation myself?
A couple of years on, I decided to try to publish a collection. My husband had started doing a few illustrations for the poems – watercolour drawings that did what a good picture book does, the drawings giving the child a pictorial, visual focus and adding an extra dimension to the words on the page. Often his illustrations would make me laugh out loud, along with the child who was listening to the poem. We hatched a plan to do a collaboration – a book of poems with full colour images. This seems to be quite unusual as a form of poetry publishing. I’ve not seen many, if any, single poet collections presented in this way. Most have line drawings only. Perhaps it’s the economics of commercial publishing that prohibits the luxury of full colour?
In June 2025 we published the book as print-on-demand paperback or hardcover on Amazon. We’ve been thrilled with the responses – from other poets like Michael Rosen, Carole Bromley, Moniza Alvi, Victoria Gatehouse and Alison Binney but also, very importantly from the parents, grandparents, childminders and children who are now starting to read the book together.
If you have a little one somewhere in your life, we’d love you to share the book with them. And let us know which are their favourite poems, and what they make of the illustrations. Comments at the end of this blog would be a great pleasure for us to read!
Snap! Poems for Children is available here, in paperback and hardcover:
Comentarios