Michael Rosen is one of the best-loved poets and writers for children, and a constant friend and supporter of Newham Bookshop over many years. His poems for grown-ups are less well known and Don’t Mention the Children is his first collection since Selected Poems in 2007.
Fans of his children’s books will enjoy the way these new poems combine the silly and the sinister to catch the surrealism of everyday life, somewhere between Jacques Prévert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell. Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between childishness and childlike seriousness. But at the heart of the book is a remarkable series of poems about anti-Semitism, fascism and war, connecting the contemporary world—UKIP, Marine le Pen, Palestine (the title poem refers to the refusal of the Israeli broadcasting authorities to mention the names of children killed during the Israeli shelling of Gaza in 2014)—to the lives of Rosen’s parents and grandparents—the General Strike, the Battle of Cable Street, Vichy and Auschwitz.
The Wanstead Tap is in a railway arch underneath London Overground. The nearest station is Wanstead Park.
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.
