Plague Songs
by Martin Rowson
(Smokestack Books, £9.99)

AT THE very beginning of 2020 Martin Rowson — cartoonist, poet and brazen scribe of the end times — took a train from Lewisham to Charing Cross. A fortnight later, during an event in London’s Cartoon Museum, he started feeling unwell.

“For the next two weeks I was incapable of anything,” he writes at the beginning of Plague Songs, “feeling iller than I had for 50 years.”

Though exhibiting telltale symptoms now familiar to many — breathlessness, night sweats, aching joints — it never crossed his mind that he “could possibly be suffering from the disease in China increasingly dominating the news.”

And why would he? Over the following months, as incoming travellers remained untested and the prime minister failed to attend several Cobra meetings on what was swiftly becoming an international public health emergency, the government refused to properly inform us of the dangers of Covid-19 — quite the contrary, they were downplayed — or take steps to minimise its devastating consequences. The rest is history.

When lockdown did arrive, two months after he fell ill, Rowson didn’t waste any time. He wrote a poem at the beginning of each day, employing “the Cartier-Bresson model, in honour of the great French photographer who only ever took one exposure of a subject: in other words, I wanted to knock the bastards out fast.”

And so he did. From May 11 until November 26, Rowson pretty much wrote a poem a day. “Whereas many found their lockdown solace in sourdough baking or growing beards, I was soon drawing mine from this regular matutinal mental throat clearing.”

Originally posted to his website (mstar.link/3n5KNNW), the vast majority have now been collected in a handsomely produced pandemic anthology, available from the ever-dependable Smokestack Books.

In chronological order, and punctuated by the occasional juicy disparaging cartoon from the Rowson atelier — see Uroboros above — they together form an oblique account of the bleakest of years: “Many are furious, some are meant to be funny; quite a lot, I hope, are both,” he writes.

The heady mix of outrage and humour is an ideal salve. When it comes to a catastrophe so badly handled by a simultaneously inept and corrupt government, it is better to laugh than to cry. As more and more details emerge about precisely how the Tories have exploited a once in a lifetime opportunity to avoid all scrutiny and make their incompetent friends staggeringly rich, Rowson takes us back to where it all began – the playground:

“How fitting is the fate/ Of children who are taught to think/ They’re smart, and good, and great?/ But eliminate alumni/ And I’m told you’ll find the jobs/ The nation needs done urgently/ Will all be done by yobs,/ Unschooled and undependable, And simply the wrong tool/ To sort out track and trace or PPE, And why? Wrong school!/ But if you ask a favour/ From a nice Public School kid/ There’s every chance they’ll do it/ For under a million quid.”

The poems are set to music by Jon Tregenna (mstar.link/3tUTcq9) and sung, screamed and shouted by a range of operatic reprobates.

Though writing verse in homage to Kipling, Keats and Stevie Smith among others, Rowson has adopted a unique style that one can only describe as, well, Rowsonian: “Covid swerves in a tight circle and starts all over again/ Old No-Eyes frugs a circuit with his scythe/ And Johnson fists himself with his own tousled turnip head/ Though none of us would ever guess the wanker was so lithe.”

With that pleasant image in mind, let Rowson have the final say. “Whatever their fate now,” he says of his stanzas, they remain “a genuine daily response to a unique and terrible period in all our lives, in which thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens died and a small number of our nation’s governing party’s chums made millions.”