On The Move by Michael Rosen ill. Quentin Blake

ACHUKA #BookOfTheDay 8 Oct 2020

COVID very nearly killed Michael Rosen. He had a much, much longer stay in hospital and a much rougher ride than the Prime Minister. He still hasn’t fully recovered physically but, judging from his activity on Twitter, his mind has been unaffected.

The collection’s title took me back to the poem of the same name by Thom Gunn:

Men manufacture both machine and soul,

And use what they imperfectly control

To dare a future from the taken routes.

This book might so nearly have been his final collection. As it is, we can dare to look forward to a future with more poetry from Michael in the years to come.

Here he joins forces with Quentin Blake, focusing on migration and displacement. The poems are divided into four series: in the first, he draws on his childhood as part of a first-generation Polish family living in London; in the second, on his perception of the War as a young boy; in the third, on his ‘missing’ relatives and the Holocaust; and in the fourth, on global experiences of migration.

It’s a classic collection and, I would imagine, highly collectable.

Waterstones
Amazon

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