Carrying the Elephant

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Clever modern poetry - Rated
I bought this after seeing Michael Rosen (now children's poet laureate) at a book festival where he managed to keep an audience of children and adults captivated for well over an hour with his stories and snapshots of his life and family.

The poems in Carrying the Elephant are the same thing - significant fragments and pieces from his life that tell you a lot about him and his family.

They all feel quite dark but the most important ones are those in the middle of the book that deal with the unexpected death of his 18-year-old son from meningitis. These include the angry "don't tell me how to mourn" poem which is an exact replication of the anger felt at an unexplainable and unexpected death and a lot of other poems dealing with the deep deep grief he felt.

This is clever, modern poetry that reads more like prose than poems but it works well in capturing the honesty of Rosen's feelings and emotions expressed here. Overly flowerly and dense wordy poetry would detract from the thoughts and feelings that he has distilled down to the bare elements.

Worth reading if you're grieving or if someone close to you is as it lays out the confusion, anger and other emotions of grief in a simple way that's easier to understand.

Shaking the kaleidoscope - Rated
Carrying the Elephant is made up of 72 untitled, and mostly very short, prose poems, picking out vivid scenes from Michael Rosen's life so far, and then on to the next, which could be minutes or years later. The effect is a bit like shaking a kaleidoscope instead of turning it steadily.

Only around twenty of the pieces - embedded at the heart of the collection - deal directly with Rosen's son's sudden death from meningitis at the age of eighteen, but the pain and shock of that devastating event seem to spread outwards through the whole collection. Or maybe that's just how it seemed to me. I bought this book when I was desperately struggling with a very similar loss, frantically grabbing at poetry to distill feelings that prose somehow couldn't touch, feeling able to read half a page on a good day, when a whole book was impossible.

What Rosen does is to capture the unpredictable and the unacceptable - the feelings you probably wouldn't know about if you haven't been there, and the ones you'd probably hesitate to voice if you have. This is immensely liberating. Rosen is particularly good on conveying the inability to do normal things or think normal thoughts, and the even more frightening inability to know what you think or what you feel. And while that's happening, you've got other people's reactions to deal with somehow. Rosen gets it spot on with a deadpan account of a perfectly decent person getting it horribly wrong - the neighbour who nervously comments "Rather you than me" before going on to mention the football. Rosen follows this up with someone probably a lot closer to him getting it in the neck with the angry "Don't tell me that I mourn too much". Yes, that feeling sounds familiar. So does the loneliness and bewilderment of "I can't answer your question 'what can I say?' as I don't know what to say either." Or "You ask me how it's possible for me to carry on. I wonder if I look like someone who looks like it's possible to carry on".

So for me Carrying the Elephant works brilliantly as therapy. As poetry I'm not so sure. The pieces read like passages of very vivid, spare prose, with the rhythm and the line breaks in some, but certainly not others, cleverly conveying the feel of the content. There's not much metaphor and little conventional metre or rhyme, but maybe that's the point of a prose poem.

Anyway, the technique works well on page 61, a brusque and antagonistic exchange of letters with authority, the words and phrases tersely batted back and forth like in a tennis match. And in the more emotional poems, the jerky and disrupted feel does convey very powerfully the disjointed thoughts and incoherence of someone suffering deep pain and shock. The line breaks here act like a pause for breath in an obsessive monologue, or build up suspense and a sense of reluctance to say the unsayable, as on page 47 - "dear joe, your wild noisy huge brother (line break) is dead". The flatness of the minimal punctuation and no capitalisation adds to the devastation and desolation of the meaning.

For me though, a lot of the pieces just read like a paragraph or two of prose with the line breaks put in to make it look and feel like a poem. Reading about "the (line break) council" or "chanel (line break) no.5" can be pretty irritating unless the effect feels worthwhile and all too often it doesn't.

This is a minor quibble though - if the minimum definition of poetry is intensified speech then Carrying the Elephant says plenty that I needed to hear, and as intensely as I needed to hear it.

Mexico City - Rated
Like a lot of other people who grew up in the 1970's I was introduced to the work of Michael Rosen through the BBC's Schools & Colleges television programmes.

In the mid '90s Rosen had a book out in the Penguin '60s series and since it was only the price of a light bulb (sixty pence) I bought a copy.

When I read the reviews of Carrying the Elephant I asked around old school friends did they remember Michael Rosen from the 1970s Schools & Colleges BBC programmes? They did, and each, give or take, had a new Rosen apercue to add to the collection.

Carrying the Elephant is a book of prose poems, spanning decades, and seeing time open and close.

Reading this book is to laugh, and reading it to cry, and reading to revisit language as language is, not for the bucks or the glory, but like to live as a human.

Cry, laugh, clap, laugh, cry.

The area is bigger than Mexico City