Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS
MICHAEL ROSEN
(EBURY PRESS, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

If you write
prose so it looks like poetry
like this
in very short lines
does it elevate and universalise the words
or does it just read
like a runner-up in a school magazine?

I’ve been pondering this for a few days, since finishing former children’s laureate Michael Rosen’s memoir of his long, slow convalescence from Covid, all written in short poetry-style lines like that, with extremely simple language.