Author(s): Roger McGough

Poetry

Take comfort from this. You have a book in your hand not a loaded gun or a parking fine or an invitation card to the wedding of the one you should have married.

Roger McGough is a poet at once directly accessible and a master of the art of surprise, in which the everyday wold is refreshingly and, at times, darkly reimagined. Although a distinct sense of menace inhabits many of the poems, he faces the uncertainties and fears of ageing with characteristic wit and courage. One of the most striking poems in this new collection is a reworking of his famous 1960s poem 'let Me Die a Youngman's Death' this time entitled 'Not For Me a Youngmans's Death'.

He is a poet of many voices, the Scottish hard man, the smug husband on his deathbed, the odious self-deceiver of the title poem. McGough is equally 'At Home with the Surrealists' as he is on an underground station waiting for a train that will never arrive. Always inventive and irrepressibly comic, the warmth and honesty of the voice reaffirms his position as a true original.