Posted on: 16 March 2023
The Advantages of Nearly Dying – poems by Michael Rosen
Smokestack Books, 2023, £8.99
Review by Mike Waddington
Michael Rosen is having a very productive time – this is his fourth book drawing on his Covid experience - and the 152 poems here are witty, wry and at times raw and agonising; he has a “deja-whiff” -
I’m beginning to think
I’m attached to hospital now.
My head lives there.
(p148)
It dominates his lonely times …
I pause,
I look at it, turn it over,
Name it,
And try to drain it of its power to reach into me.
(p164)
This “draining” makes these poems heroic, confronting the haunted – agonised – past; what might have been, what has been lost, guilt, fear. He’s a “Noah in the rain.”
There’s plenty of uplift – about the NHS, the staff and his own recovery:
I said to the physio at the rehab
That I didn’t think I would be able
To do a show
To 100s of children in a theatre again.
She said I would.
This year,
I did a show to 100s of children
At the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
A woman with her kids
Asked me to sign a book.
It’s me, she said.
It was the physio
(p174)
One point of poetry is to contain powerful emotions (think weddings and funerals) and what stirs in Michael Rosen is powerful, and sometimes dark:
I wonder if I will have to get up
In the night for a pee
And I think about the quiet dark
Of the house
Which will be there
If I do.
(p86)
And:
When I came home
I pretended I was happier than I was.
I pretended that
I wasn’t finding myself
Back in lonely places
Of the hospital
Again and again.
(164)
(on the Rehab ward) I see me back then
Trying hard to be happy.
But inside there were dark corners
Where I was afraid that I had fallen apart:
The man who forgets yesterday.
(p172)
His mind is filled with memories of his mother’s “cold hands” and the death of his son (from meningitis) and the nightmares this brings. Thinking on the beginnings of lockdown reminds him:
Some days I thought
It was my fault that Eddie died.
I didn’t spot meningococcal septicaemia
I didn’t see it.
I thought
If it was my fault
I must have killed him.
I pore over stories of survivors … looking for something.
(p140)
In his ‘Sonnet for Anne Frank’ he grapples:
Each time we read, we struggle to enjoy
Your love of life while knowing how it ended
(p184)
But the journey through these pages has plenty to smile at and laugh at too and get angry about.
And plenty to reflect on:
Or it could (be?) profoundly encouraging
That what we have is being here
Because we could make the best of it
While there’s time.
(p175)
And he’s full of ideas on how to do that.
From most bookshops or https://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/portfolio/the-advantages-of-nearly-dying/