In early March 2020 the poet Michael Rosen was doing what he normally did, making school visits, socialising. Then Covid struck him down, and nearly killed him. He spent three months in hospital, of which nearly seven weeks were in an induced coma. In his new book of poetry about his long road to recovery, The Advantages of Nearly Dying, he blames Boris Johnson’s government for what happened to him. He makes this quite clear in the first words of the preface to the book, introducing his poems thus: “How the government ended up killing and maiming us in February, March and April 2020.” He blames official failure to act quickly enough on a flirtation with the theory of ‘herd immunity’, and concludes: “They must never be let off the hook.”

In ‘J’accuse’ he also condemns “journalists and commentators for helping to provide a seed-bed for what is in effect a form of creeping fascism, that a whole section of the population [the older members] can be dispensed with for the sake of the greater good”. His anger comes to the fore in ‘O Let’s Do Away with the Oldies”: “They take up too much space. / And who wants to be with an oldie / and look at their wrinkly face?”

More than once in this collection Rosen refers to himself as a ghost after what he has been through. In the first poem in the collection he says: “The thing is / I tried to die / and they wouldn’t let me. / So I’m probably alive.” “They” being the NHS, rather than the government: “The people exist / because the NHS makes sure that we do.” (‘The NHS and the People’).   

The poems at turns fizz with anger or black humour, either joking, or mourning his loss of seven weeks in hospital, and what it has done to him (‘I Am Not Who I Was’). They catalogue his slow road to some sort of recovery, from his new, in-growing toenails after his original toenails fell off, his difficulties in swallowing – the after-effects of undergoing a tracheostomy – problems with seeing and hearing, scarring on his lungs, needing voice therapy, and learning how to walk again.

 Without in any way trying to minimise what Rosen has been through, individually some of the poems can be seen as slight, little more than notes. But cumulatively they amount to an extraordinary documentary record. And in the midst of all this there is a sequence of poems about his son Eddie, who died of meningitis in 1999: “I think myself into his head / drifting off to sleep, / it’s 2021 – 22 years later - / and I’m trying to capture his last thoughts / as if I’m pulling film out of an old camera. / I imagine flashes, / something dazzling / falling stars falling / night.”  

By the end of the collection, he is able to focus on other subjects, such as refugees, Ukrainians and others: “We are learning how to say / welcome / In Ukrainian. / Could we learn to say it in / some other languages too?” (‘Learning’). He remembers

 

     my parents talking of aunts and uncles and cousins

     who criss-crossed the very same land

     that the refugees are crossing now,

     one who escaped

     the rest who didn’t

                                                         (‘As If in a Dream’)

 

It’s encouraging that Rosen has recovered from Covid to the extent he is able to look beyond his own condition, again.

 

But for me, the most moving – and affirmative - poem in the collection is one titled ‘The Physio’:

 

     I said to one 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.

 

Michael Rosen, The Advantages of Nearly Dying, Smokestack, £8.99