Book review: That Awkward Age

Published on Friday 26 June 2009 17:16

THAT AWKWARD AGE By Roger McGough Viking, £12.99 Review: PEGGY HUGHES

THESE poems allow national treasure Roger McGough a moment to take a wry glance at life as he's known it. He reconstructs his childhood, thanks his old addresses, remembers other famous Liverpudlian exports in Meccano and Paul McCartney's moth-eaten trousers.

The collection contains odes to all manner of things both serious and silly, and broadly finds the "miraculous in the everyday". He charts his own life and journey as a poet. To Poetry Please he presents "a little momento,/ some of your favourite lines stitched into a cento" in which he steals Lear's runcible spoons and that red wheelbarrow. He remembers the plight of being that Real Live Poet in a school, throwing a poem into the ring only for a yawning girl to swallow it. The idea of his final poem brings pause for thought: "Spare me the guilt of a commission/ a bar mitzvah or an ad for television", ending tellingly with "There are no prizes, laurels turn to dust." There is none of that 'I'm only sleeping' stuff for the funeral of McGough, who demands instead "wailing and gnashing of teeth".

That Awkward Age is a guided tour down memory lane in which McGough pulls on his skills as a raconteur, but not without some excellent diversionary tactics. There's a winning sequence in answer to Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife which gives voice to a litany of unlikely lads: Mr Sappho ("'I'm off to Lesbos with the girls'/ 'Yes, boss, shall I warm your pearls?'"); Mr Nightingale, laid up with man flu while Florrie nurses the troops; Mr of Arc ("She was always a bit of tomboy"). Much of the McGough's collection pays homage to other poets. He mimics McGonagall's "lumpen" rhymes and "dumpity-dumpen" rhythms and imagines Dylan Thomas picking up lines for Under Milk Wood from the regulars in Laugharne snug.

Constantly, teasingly playful, he conjures the poem as page-turner; there's slapstick in "How to Escape from Prison" and the surreal in "The Dada Christmas Catalogue" ("Chocolate comb/ Can-of-worms opener"). With a comic glint in his eye, McGough "builds us his world" in all its carousing variety and this "eagerly awaited new collection" is gratefully received and joyously read.