MICHAEL ROSEN is one of our best-loved writers for children. He’s the author and editor of over 140 books, including contemporary primary-school classics like We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Mind Your Own Business, No Breathing in Class and Quick Let’s Get Out of Here.

If you’re a fan of Rosen’s children’s stories, you’ll enjoy the way the works in his new book of poems for grown-ups Don’t Mention the Children combine the silly and the sinister. Somewhere between Jacques Prevert, Ivor Cutler and Adrian Mitchell, they encapsulate the surrealism of everyday life.

Few poets writing today can move so effortlessly between the childish and the childlike. But this certainly does not mean that Rosen doesn’t have serious things to say.

“When I write for children I’m partly trying to entertain the child I was and partly thinking of my own children and partly thinking of the children I meet in schools,” he tells me. “When I’m writing for adults I’m thinking of occasions when I’ve read or performed at demonstrations or benefits.

In truth, though, there are overlaps. Some of the poems that have ended up in collections for children seem to be appropriate for adult events and vice versa.” For Rosen, adults and children “are not different species.” Being alive in the world is a “disturbing, absurd and sometimes mysterious experience,” he contends.

He embraces surrealism as one way to explore these aspects of existence, to daydream and let the associations between things, feelings, images and ideas flow.

“Sometimes what comes out reveals ways in which power and oppression reach into our personal lives. Or it can make things we know and accept seem suddenly strange or odd. This can be quite shocking or subversive. It can stop us from accepting reality as it is given to us by mass media or education.” 

At the heart of Don’t Mention the Children is a remarkable series of poems about anti-semitism, fascism and war, linking the contemporary world — Ukip, Marine le Pen, Palestine — to the lives of Rosen’s parents and grandparents — the General Strike, the Battle of Cable Street, Vichy and the Holocaust.

“I’m the kind of Jew who has a background in eastern Europe,” he explains. “My great-grandparents came out of situations of persecution justified by the perpetrators simply because they were Jews.

“In the mid-20th century, some of my relatives found themselves in the midst of the horror of something worse — an attempted genocide of all Jews everywhere. They were in France and were put on registers of foreign Jews by the Vichy regime. These lists were handed over to the nazis so that people could be deported, many to Auschwitz.”

Rosen is clear about the parallels with the rise of xenophobia, neo-nazism and Islamophobia today. “It’s as if the powers-that-be are saying: ‘Of course we respect and admire the Ruritanians, but...’ And then there is a long list of what’s wrong with the Ruritanians.”

It’s all too easy for those with power and control over the mass media to create fears of the “other,” he argues. “People might think, why would powerful people, running governments and media outlets lie to us? Aren’t they good and kind people who have our interests at heart?

“But, of course, Islamophobia doesn’t take place in a bubble called Britain or the US or France. It’s locked into a worldwide struggle for control over oil.”

In this context, he says, there’s the “utterly absurd” situation where many of the values and activities described by our rulers and media as unacceptable are supported by them when carried out by those regimes our governments do business with.

“Isis beheadings are ‘unacceptable’ but Saudi ones are ‘acceptable,’” he wryly observes. “This is no way to progress to a peaceful, fair and just world.” 

The book’s 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 and Rosen is clear that the Israeli state doesn’t protect Jews.

“It just kills more people than are killed,” he says. “It is not possible to live in peace, in a fair and just way for all, if groups of people persecute others simply because Jews were persecuted in eastern Europe and then during the Holocaust.

“In Palestine, one-time victims dispossessed those who had homes and work there. As long as that is supported and justified by the most powerful nations in the world, the endless cycle will go on.

“In fact, there is a vested interest by the most powerful in that cycle to not resolve the issue — they are always the net victors in the slaughter.”

Rosen grew up in a left-wing household. His parents were members of the Communist Party until 1957 and as a teenager Rosen was a “Labour left” admirer of Fenner Brockway and Michael Foot, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela.

“I went on quite a few CND marches as a teenager,” he recalls, “and this idea of a neutral socialist Britain seemed like something worth aspiring to. By the time I got to university, the Vietnam war was underway and the sheer brutality and immensity of that struggle dissipated some of this utopianism and made things much more stark.

At the same time the US civil rights movement, the rise of racist politics in Britain with Enoch Powell and the feminist movement suddenly threw politics back on me in some kind of personal way.”

Rosen realised that politics isn’t only about big speeches and big clashes. “It’s about who you are and what you do about that.” At that time he was influenced by the the International Socialists group but “when they became the SWP I thought this was a mistake, that they were throwing away the very strength they had, that it was a movement and not a party.”

Even so, Rosen wrote for them and appeared at meetings and on platforms and conferences with members without ever joining. 

A key problem for Marxists, according to Rosen, “is how to organise without repeating the power structures and ideas about authority that come down to us through capitalist society. It’s difficult precisely because we are all creatures of this society — not some imagined future one — so it’s very easy to reproduce the kinds of power structures we learn through school and work and the mass media. I am still a Marxist. But it can only make sense if it is rejuvenated by figuring out how it can include the whole human race and all the crises that it’s going through.”

Not surprisingly, Rosen is a fan of Jeremy Corbyn and confesses to “a huge sense of relief” when he hears him speak.

“After years of near consensus between the three main parties it’s wonderful to hear him asking questions from the socialist tradition.

“Suddenly, things that have been accepted by the ruling elites and the loyal oppositions are up for question. Not just once every three months in 30-second bursts on Question Time. They have to keep interviewing him and he keeps on coming.

He is also very calm and completely unlike other political figures of this time.

“To some of us, he’s a very familiar figure. We’ve seen and heard him for years. So that feels both good and strange.”

• Don’t Mention the Children is published by Smokestack Books, price £8.95. Michael Rosen is reading from the book at: Bookmarks Bookshop, Bloomsbury, London, October 19; Off the Shelf Festival, Sheffield, October 21; Teesside University, Middlesbrough, November 4; The Wansted Tap, Newham, London, November 9; The Idea Store, Whitechapel, London, November 15 and Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, London, December 19.

The bag

The doorbell rang and when I opened it there

was a man there with a bag. He said that he

was on a government scheme to take him off

benefits which is why he was going to try to

sell me stuff. He showed me an ID which had

a picture of him next to a union jack. He was

from Middlesbrough. He opened his bag and

inside the bag were oven gloves, onion

shredders, ironing board covers, computer

screen cleaners, windscreen wiper

renewal packs, pizza cutters, GCSE English

revision books, passport form-filling guides,

Protein-plus muscle bulking fluid, maps of Great

Britain, Europe and Utopia, DIY botox kits, 3-1

on Arsenal winning the London derby, Job

interview shirts, blood transfusions, heavenly

choruses and lottery prizes. I bought the onion 

shredders.