Artist Feature ... Colin West
Find out about Colin West ...
Hello Balloonists!
Here on the Dirigible Balloon we have over ninety poets who have let us upload their poems. Some are new to writing poetry and others are very well-known indeed. We feel very lucky that one of our most experienced poets, who has been with us from the very start, is also a brilliant illustrator. Colin West’s poems and pictures are hilarious and he very kindly agreed to be our featured guest for December, sending us fascinating information about his life as a poet and illustrator.![]()
Colin was born in Essex in 1951, and after a foundation course at Loughton College of F.E., he studied Graphic Design at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1969 to 1972. In his final year he became interested in children’s book illustration, realising it was this field in which he wished to work. He moved onto the Royal College of Art to study Illustration and gained his M.A. in 1975.
Colin has written over sixty books for children including The Big Book Of Nonsense, Monty the Dog and My Funny Family. Colin's latest book is called Nutty![]()
Nonsense, published on February 2nd 2022 (World Read Aloud Day) by Poems and Pictures Ltd , with all profits going to the Children's Literature Festivals Charity. More information can be found on his website at http://www.colinwest.com
So, without further ado, the Dirigible Balloon is incredibly proud to present …
Here on the Dirigible Balloon we have over ninety poets who have let us upload their poems. Some are new to writing poetry and others are very well-known indeed. We feel very lucky that one of our most experienced poets, who has been with us from the very start, is also a brilliant illustrator. Colin West’s poems and pictures are hilarious and he very kindly agreed to be our featured guest for December, sending us fascinating information about his life as a poet and illustrator.
Colin was born in Essex in 1951, and after a foundation course at Loughton College of F.E., he studied Graphic Design at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1969 to 1972. In his final year he became interested in children’s book illustration, realising it was this field in which he wished to work. He moved onto the Royal College of Art to study Illustration and gained his M.A. in 1975.
Colin has written over sixty books for children including The Big Book Of Nonsense, Monty the Dog and My Funny Family. Colin's latest book is called Nutty
So, without further ado, the Dirigible Balloon is incredibly proud to present …
The Artwork of Colin West
From Boomerangs to Kangaroo Meringues
by Colin West
I’ve been studying Nonsense for over 60 years now. Of course, at first, I didn’t realise I was studying the subject. I was just enjoying the sound that rhyming words make when put together, especially if they made me laugh. I can still remember the delight I first felt when hearing about Michael Finnegan and his ingrowing whiskers. And also the dreamlike adventure of the Owl and the Pussycat, which my mum read to me from a book she’d been given as a school prize before the war. And being a child in the 50s, you could hardly turn on the radio without hearing about one’s male relative being a refuse collector, or boomerangs that didn’t come back, or hippopotamuses who wallowed in mud, mud, glorious mud. It all made me smile.
In the school playground, I learned how Popeye the Sailor man poetically relieved himself in various parts of his caravan. And inside school we sang traditional folk songs and sea shanties when joining in with the BBC’s Singing Together. I picked up tips on alliteration, repetition and accumulative verse. I was dashing away with the smoothing iron, went donkey riding and inquired what to do with the drunken sailor. In assembly and at Sunday School I enjoyed the rousing words of To Be a Pilgrim (well done, John Bunyan!) and the haunting poetry of In the Bleak Midwinter (thank you kindly, Christina Rossetti).
On TV, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, was forever riding![]()
through the glen with his Merry men, Davy, Davy Crockett was king of the wild frontier, and Top Cat was the indisputable leader of the gang. A nice way to learn scansion and new long words. The adverts too left their mark on me. I was struck by the neatness of Drinka Pinta Milka Day and how Kellogg’s Ricicles are Twicicles as Nicicles. One evening, catching Spike Milligan on TV’s Royal Command Performance, and hearing his punny poem about terns, ending with the line “One good tern deserves another” I thought that the most hilarious moment in the whole show. So though we had few books in our house, I mostly studied (enjoyed) the art of Rhyme and Rhythm (which was another BBC radio programme, by the way) through absorbing all this varied material.
My teenage years conveniently coincided with the career of the Beatles, whose lyrics pleased me as much as did their melodies — the black humour of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (set to a jaunty McCartney tune) and Lennon’s surreal I Am the Walrus, a nod to his literary hero Lewis Carroll. And I soon discovered that another pop group, which featured McCartney’s brother, also contained a bloke who’d written proper poems printed in a book. His name was (and remains) Roger McGough, and his wordplay and humour were a most refreshing change to the rather dry poetry we’d analysed at school.
By now I was experimenting with my own words. At art college, first with limericks, and then with talking blues, a style pioneered by the likes of Woody Guthrie and taken up by Bob Dylan, I’d write funny stuff with my friends. Away from home in Wolverhampton I’d spend my evenings filling Woolworth notebooks with poems about laundrettes and lavatories. I was finding my “voice.”
![]()
When I was about 21, I returned to my childhood favourite, Edward Lear, and found his lesser known Nonsense in an omnibus edition. I also purloined a paperback by Ogden Nash, with his creatively twisted rhymes, which my parents had given my brother a few years earlier, but which was more up my avenue (which he rhymed with havenue, by the way). I also came to realise that many of the musical standards I’d grown up with were written by a handful of songwriters, often for Fred Astaire musicals. So I listened to this out-of-fashion music, (this was the 70s) and savoured the witty lyrics of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and Dorothy Fields.
At the Royal College of Art, which by then I was![]()
attending, there was a rare Mervyn Peake book, which you had to ask permission to examine. Emerging from a back room, the librarian handed me a copy of Rhymes Without Reason. With Peake’s colour illustrations and bitter-sweet nonsense verse creating a unique magical world, it seemed the epitome of eccentric genius. A series of anthologies by William Cole with Tomi Ungerer illustrations was equally inspiring. And then one day, one of my tutors showed me a book he’d recently illustrated. “He’s got hundreds of them,” he remarked as for the first time I read the groundbreaking poems of Michael Rosen.
By the time I left college, I started collecting all the![]()
humorous verse I could find. The secondhand bookshops were full of house clearance stock, and books from the golden age of comic verse, the 1930s, could be had for pence rather than pounds. I discovered Harry Graham and his Ruthless Rhymes, and many other more obscure rhymesters, now largely forgotten. And I made up for lost time, catching up with others whose work had passed me by, namely Hilaire Belloc and W. S. Gilbert. And I grew to love Walter de la Mare, whose Nonsense, I found, was of the highest order. I was reading all these works, and simultaneously enjoying (studying?) the art of poetry, and writing more of my own. I was lucky that various publishers took on my collections, and there were lots of anthologies to be in, compiled by John Foster, Paul Cookson and Wendy Cope to name but a few.
Now I’ve reached my three score and ten, and (thanks to the Internet) I still seek out poets who are new to me, and who bring me delight in much the same way as Michael Finnegan did when I was a small boy all those years ago.
And I’m still endeavouring to make up my own.![]()
![]()
![]()
by Colin West
I’ve been studying Nonsense for over 60 years now. Of course, at first, I didn’t realise I was studying the subject. I was just enjoying the sound that rhyming words make when put together, especially if they made me laugh. I can still remember the delight I first felt when hearing about Michael Finnegan and his ingrowing whiskers. And also the dreamlike adventure of the Owl and the Pussycat, which my mum read to me from a book she’d been given as a school prize before the war. And being a child in the 50s, you could hardly turn on the radio without hearing about one’s male relative being a refuse collector, or boomerangs that didn’t come back, or hippopotamuses who wallowed in mud, mud, glorious mud. It all made me smile.
In the school playground, I learned how Popeye the Sailor man poetically relieved himself in various parts of his caravan. And inside school we sang traditional folk songs and sea shanties when joining in with the BBC’s Singing Together. I picked up tips on alliteration, repetition and accumulative verse. I was dashing away with the smoothing iron, went donkey riding and inquired what to do with the drunken sailor. In assembly and at Sunday School I enjoyed the rousing words of To Be a Pilgrim (well done, John Bunyan!) and the haunting poetry of In the Bleak Midwinter (thank you kindly, Christina Rossetti).
On TV, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, was forever riding
.jpeg)
My teenage years conveniently coincided with the career of the Beatles, whose lyrics pleased me as much as did their melodies — the black humour of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (set to a jaunty McCartney tune) and Lennon’s surreal I Am the Walrus, a nod to his literary hero Lewis Carroll. And I soon discovered that another pop group, which featured McCartney’s brother, also contained a bloke who’d written proper poems printed in a book. His name was (and remains) Roger McGough, and his wordplay and humour were a most refreshing change to the rather dry poetry we’d analysed at school.
By now I was experimenting with my own words. At art college, first with limericks, and then with talking blues, a style pioneered by the likes of Woody Guthrie and taken up by Bob Dylan, I’d write funny stuff with my friends. Away from home in Wolverhampton I’d spend my evenings filling Woolworth notebooks with poems about laundrettes and lavatories. I was finding my “voice.”
.jpeg)
At the Royal College of Art, which by then I was
By the time I left college, I started collecting all the
Now I’ve reached my three score and ten, and (thanks to the Internet) I still seek out poets who are new to me, and who bring me delight in much the same way as Michael Finnegan did when I was a small boy all those years ago.
And I’m still endeavouring to make up my own.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
All pictures by kind permission of Colin West ... article organised and edited by JH
This poem is copyright (©) Jonathan Humble 2024
About the Writer
Jonathan Humble
Jonathan lives in Cumbria. His work has been published online and in print in a number of magazines and anthologies. His first collection of poetry, My Camel's Name Is Brian, was published by TMB Books in 2015. His second poetry book, Fledge came out in 2020 through Maytree Press. His poems for children have been shortlisted and highly commended in the Caterpillar and Yorkmix poetry competitions and he is the editor of The Dirigible Balloon. His poems Masterclass and This Work is Done were chosen as the Milk House Poem of the Year at the end of 2022 and 2023.
