Product Description

Roger McGough's eagerly-awaited new collection is a powerful testament to the miraculous in the everyday. Here he builds us his world: one of chance encounters and embarrassing moments, of big questions and small wonders. 'At that awkward age now between birth and death,' he addresses Alzheimers and wrestles with mortality. He resolves (and fails) to live every day as if it were his last, joins the Foreign Legion, jives in Macca's trousers, shares the pain of Mr Sappho and Lord Godiva and plans a prison break. With his inimitable warmth, wit and wordplay, Roger McGough affirms his position as the pre-eminent poet of the magic moment – the happy collision of life, language and the imagination.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127300 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

About the Author
Roger McGough is one of Britain's best-known poetry voices. Following the success of the bestselling Penguin collection The Mersey Sound (with Brian Patten and the late Adrian Henri) he has been captivating children and adults alike with his unique blend of heart and wit for more than four decades. Much travelled and translated he is now an international ambassador for poetry and was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in 2001, and with a CBE in 2005. In 2008 he successfully adapted Molière's play, Tartuffe, for the Liverpool Everyman Theatre.

Customer Reviews

Meeting an Old Friend
Reading this book was just that - like meeting an old friend. I first made Roger Mcgough's "acquaintance! as it were, back in the 60s, with his performances with The Scaffold and the McGough/Henri/Patten book of poems, "The Mersey Sound". Even then, in the full flush (!) of youth, Roger demonstarted his ability to amuse and to move. Nearly half a century later, he still can raise smiles and tears - this time with an awareness of his own mortality, as seen in his "To My Final Poem", in this collection.I chuckled aloud at his "Mr Sappho" - as if the archetypical Lesbian had a chap! and "Mr of Arc". I finished this book feeling that I'd passed an hour with a long lost old mate - I strongly recommend "That Awkward Age" to readers of any age.

Delightful collection
Lovely varied collection, with lots of humour and some quiet underlying seriousness. Good stuff for reading aloud as well as to oneself.

A serious if whimsical look at life's difficult bits
Roger McGough's latest collection of poems turns a sardonic if quietly celebratory eye on the vagaries of life's awkward age - the bit between birth and death. He is, you suspect, a poet who sees life as serious, but best approached in a whimsical frame of mind. That outlook undergirds verse on subjects as diverse as Meccano and death, love in a bus queue and the bitterness of Enid Blyton's husband, usurped in her affections by her literary creations. Some of McGough's odes (especially "To contact lenses") reach the heights of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and even his more playful offerings ("Not to mention the reader's") amuse, for the most part, rather than irritate. And if some of his ideas are a bit derivative (his seven poems in the voice of famous women's husbands owe a clear debt to Carol Ann Duffy's "The World's Wife"), he gives them his own inimitable stamp - the faintly bewildered tone of Mr Blyton, a man in the presence of something greater than himself that he only dimly comprehends, is a delight.

Yes, the tone occasionally dives into the sententious or the sentimental - the latter in poems like "Eternal Rest" - but not for long: two pages later comes along the discomfiting, cold-eyed stoicism of "I Am Not Sleeping". A rewarding and varied collection, then, if not the most devastatingly original or profound - but pretty much what you expect from one of the nation's favourite lighter poets.