Many Different Kinds of Love – Review

Many Different Kinds of Love, by Michael Rosen

So I remember when, in March 2020, it came out on the news that Michael Rosen was in intensive care with Covid-19. I remember being quite worried at the time - the man was a national treasure, and I knew his poetry collection 'Mustard, Custard, Grumble-Belly and Gravy' so well... I remember hearing that he had been put into an induced coma with a 50:50 chance of waking up, and I remember hearing the miraculous news that he had indeed woken up from it six weeks later. I remember this all happening. So when I saw that Michael had published a book about this period of his life, combining newly written poetry, excerpts from his wife Emma's letters and text messages, and the patient diary kept by the NHS nurses and doctors whilst he was in a coma, I knew I had to read it.

We bought it for Mum, and she whipped through it in about three days. She kept reading out little bits of it to us in the car and we were all choking up listening. Before I managed to get my hands on it, it was lent out to Grandma - who, astonishingly, also finished it in about a week, and brought it back. My turn came, and I can absolutely understand how they both read it so quickly. After accidentally consuming half of it in one sitting, I decided I had to ration myself. But the whole thing was just such compelling reading; in spite of my best efforts to space out my portions, I still finished it in two days.

The poetry in it is just so moving. It's prose poetry, so stylistic of Michael Rosen, and I think it's just the perfect mode of expression to communicate everything that he went through. It reads like a series of thoughts, which makes it very raw, very honest, very real. Bits of it made me well up, like when he reflects on all the moments he could have died:

If Emma hadn't called the GP neighbour

if she hadn't tested me

I would have just faded away

a few hours later

all systems failing.

If the doctors hadn't put me on their machines:

ventilator and tracheostomy

I might have died for lack of oxygen,

if the nurses hadn't suctioned the secretions

out of my lungs

I might have drowned in my own phlegm,

if they hadn't played the music

that Emma had chosen

I might have stayed in a coma.

All those FaceTime phone calls

when she told me not to worry,

don't worry about a thing

how I was going to be OK

and she was telling people that I was

getting better

and I realised she was holding me,

propping me up with words.

All that care and belief and love

keeping me in the world.

I look at Emma

and try to tell her

but I'm often too upset to be able to say it

and just put a hand over my eyes

and feel the tears.

I've got a lump in my throat just typing it out here! At times it's harrowing, and at times it also manages to be extremely funny. But the thread that binds it all together is the overwhelming love that permeated his whole coronavirus journey. And this really comes through in the bits that aren't poetry - in the messages from his wife Emma sending love and support and telling him to carry on, and in the NHS patient diary.

The patient diary blew my mind. Every day that Michael was in an induced coma (six whole weeks), the doctors and nurses that cared for him wrote a diary explaining who they each were and what they had done to look after him that day or that night. He was then given this diary once he had woken up, in order that he would have some way of knowing what happened in a time that he wouldn't be able to remember anything of. And their care was incredible. They washed him, and gave him a shave, and put him in a more comfortable position, and played him music, and chatted to him, and sung him happy birthday when it was his birthday... You also get to see from reading this diary the sheer number of staff members that were drafted in from other departments to help out in intensive care as the pandemic was taking off - speech and language therapists, paediatricians, physios... The encouragement and love they show in their writing to him is so powerful to read. And so many of them also thank him for his poetry, which is tear-jerkingly lovely.

Overall, I think this is such an important book. The way it draws together three perspectives - Michael's, the doctors' and nurses', and his family's - gives such a 3-dimensional portrait of the early pandemic era. It's thought-provoking, it's moving, it's funny, it's powerful. It's well worth a read.