Pebbles

Michael Rosen has been, for many years, a prodigious and prolific user of Twitter (now known as 'Eggs'). Unlike the armies of ‘anonymous tweeters / raging in the twilight’, his Tweets are variously fables, squibs, musings, daily observations and lifelong preoccupations – pitted prunes, anteaters, Sisyphus, the sound of rain stopping, garlic pickle, blocked sinks, lost suitcases, legs, hummus and bagels, Sats tests, Runcorn, grief, saggy jumpers, chicken soup, Eurovision, COVID, labyrinthitis, kookaburras, fringe-magnets, cucumber raita, sneezing, shamans, raisins, armpit scratching, Rishi Sunak’s maths, pest-control, Dominic Raab and Franz Kafka, skip-wrestling, the after-life, the icing on the cake, antisemitism, Gaza… Pebbles is a collection of some of Michael Rosen’s most recent poetry-tweets. Sharp, pithy and eloquent, serious and comical, wise and perplexed, these are the everyday reports of an ‘optimistic nihilist' –someone who doesn’t believe there is any point to existence, but thinks that this is a good reason to make the most of this life while we can.