|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Roger McGoughRoger McGough
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyAward-winning poet, playwright, broadcaster and children's author Roger McGough was born on 9 November 1937 in Liverpool, England. He was educated at St Mary's College, Crosby, Liverpool, and at Hull University. He taught at St Kevin's Comprehensive School, Kirby, and lectured at Mabel Fletcher College in Liverpool and at the Liverpool College of Art. He was a member of the pop music/poetry group 'The Scaffold' between 1963 and 1973. He made his name as one of the 'Liverpool Poets' with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, included in The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10 (1967). A Fellow of John Moores University in Liverpool, he won a Cholmondeley Award in 1999 and was awarded an honorary MA from Nene College of Further Education. He was Fellow of Poetry at the University of Loughborough (1973-5), Honorary Professor at Thames Valley University (1993) and is a member of the Executive Council of the Poetry Society. He was awarded an OBE in 1997.
Roger McGough's autobiography, Said and Done, was published in 2005. His latest adult poetry collection is That Awkward Age (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Children, Drama, Non-fiction, Poetry, Screenplay, Song lyrics
BibliographyUnderdog: New Poems/edited by Brian Patten Underdog Publications, 1965 The Liverpool Scene (contributor) Donald Carroll, 1967 The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10 (Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten) Penguin (revised edition 1980), 1967 Watchwords Cape, 1969 After The Merrymaking Cape, 1971 Out of Sequence (limited edition) Turret Books, 1972 Gig Cape, 1973 The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (contributor) Oxford University Press, 1973 Sporting Relations Eyre Methuen, 1974 In the Glassroom Cape, 1976 Mr Noselighter André Deutsch, 1976 Portfolio no. 3 (contributor - limited edition) Steam Press, 1976 Frinck, A Life in the Day of, and Summer with Monika: Poems Joseph, 1978 Holiday on Death Row Cape, 1979 You Tell Me: Poems by Roger McGough and Michael Rosen (with Michael Rosen) Viking Kestrel, 1979 Unlucky for Some (limited edition) Bernard Stone, 1980 Strictly Private: An Anthology of Poetry (editor) Viking Kestrel, 1981 The Great Smile Robbery Viking Kestrel, 1982 Waving at Trains Cape, 1982 New Volume: The Penguin Poets (with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri) Penguin, 1983 Sky in the Pie Viking Kestrel, 1983 The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (contributor) Norton, 1983 Crocodile Puddles New Pyramid Press, 1984 Kingfisher Book of Comic Verse (editor) Kingfisher, 1986 Melting into the Foreground Viking, 1986 Noah's Ark Dinosaur, 1986 The Stowaways Viking Kestrel, 1986 Nailing the Shadow Viking, 1987 Worry: A Phoenix Broadsheet, no. 312 Toni Savage, 1987 An Imaginary Menagerie Viking, 1988 Counting by Numbers Viking Kestrel, 1989 Helen Highwater Viking, 1989 Selected Poems, 1967-1987 Cape, 1989 Pillow Talk Viking Kestrel, 1990 Puffin Portable Poets (with Brian Patten and Kit Wright) Puffin, 1990 The Oxford ABC Picture Dictionary Oxford University Press, 1990 An A-Z of the Elements (with John Emsley) Channel 4, 1991 The Lighthouse that Ran Away Bodley Head, 1991 You at the Back: Selected Poems, 1967-87 Cape, 1991 Defying Gravity Viking, 1992 My Dad's a Fire-Eater Penguin, 1992 Another Custard Pie Collins, 1993 Lucky Viking, 1993 Pen Pals: A New Poem Prospero Poets, 1994 Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Liz Lochhead, Roger McGough, Sharon Olds) Penguin, 1995 Stinkers Ahoy! Viking, 1995 The Magic Fountain Bodley Head, 1995 The Kite and Caitlin Bodley Head, 1996 Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died (with John Agard, Wendy Cope, Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten) Macmillan Children's Books, 1997 Bad, Bad Cats Viking, 1997 Ferens, the Gallery Cat Ferens Art Gallery, 1997 The Kingfisher Book of Poems about Love (editor) Kingfisher, 1997 Until I Met Dudley Frances Lincoln, 1997 The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Poems for Children (editor) Faber and Faber, 1998 The Spotted Unicorn: The Diaries of Chi Wen Tzu (editor) Viking, 1998 Five Finger-Piglets: Poems (with Brian Patten, Jackie Kay, Carol Ann Duffy and Gareth Owen) Macmillan Children's Books, 1999 The Big Book of Little Poems (contributor) André Deutsch, 1999 The Way Things Are Viking, 1999 Dotty Inventions Francis Lincoln, 2002 Everyday Eclipses Viking, 2002 Good Enough to Eat Puffin, 2002 Moonthief Kingfisher, 2002 What on Earth? Puffin, 2002 Collected Poems Viking, 2003 Wicked Poems (editor; illustrated by Neal Layton) Bloomsbury, 2004 Said and Done: The Autobiography Century, 2005 Poems for Bootle Driftwood, 2007 Slapstick Puffin, 2008 The Book of Liverpool: A City in Short Fiction (contributor) Comma Press, 2008 You Have Been Warned! A Collection of Cautionary Verse (selector; illustrated by Chris Mould) Oxford University Press, 2008 That Awkward Age Viking, 2009
Prizes and awards1984 Signal Poetry Award Sky in the Pie 1985 BAFTA (Best Children's Programme Documentary/Educational) Kurt, Mungo, BP and Me 1993 Royal Television Society Award (best film) The Elements 1997 OBE 1999 Cholmondeley Award 1999 Signal Poetry Award Bad, Bad Cats
Critical PerspectiveRoger McGough has been one of Britain’s most well-loved poets since his work was included in the Penguin anthology, The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10, in 1967, along with the other ‘Liverpool Poets’, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten. The Mersey Sound has since sold over one million copies. Of the three Liverpool Poets who came to prominence at that time, all strongly influenced by Beat poetry, McGough has had by far the most steady and continuous success, quickly becoming a household name throughout Britain. He is also prolific - he has published over 50 books of poetry for adults and children, along with numerous plays - and he has always been a very active performance poet as well as a writer.
McGough is known for his accessibility - his poetry reaches a wide audience and he has always been keen to stay out of the ivory tower of academia and ‘high brow’ poetry that is inaccessible to the general reader. However, as an accessible and extremely popular poet, he has always struggled with the attitude that assumes that his work is not worthy of serious literary attention. He was disappointed not to be awarded the prestigious role of Poet Laureate after the death of Ted Hughes in 1998 (it went to Andrew Motion):
'One of the problems is it does tend to be a certain kind of poet […] Male, for a start. Middle class. All those things. Whereas it might be interesting to have a black poet or a lady poet […] or why not a children’s poet?' (The Guardian, 14 November, 2005)
McGough’s trademark is his humour, particularly his sharp comic timing. In his early works, he emphasised humour particularly strongly, for fear of being thought pretentious:
'If I’d written a serious poem I’d always end up making it funny, to prove to this imagined reader or listener, which would have been a fellow Liverpudlian, that I’m not better than you. It took a while to have the confidence to be serious.' (The Guardian, 14 November, 2005)
McGough’s voice has always epitomised the working-class Liverpool of his childhood: down-to-earth, unpretentious, dry, witty, ironic and sceptical. He engages in mischievous word-play, particularly that of inventing his own words or word combinations, and he mocks and subverts clichés and other overly-familiar expressions. In ‘First Day at School’, he uses this approach to convey the child’s overwhelmed and confused state of mind. The speaker is ‘A millionbillionwillion miles from home / Waiting for the bell to go (To go where?)’, while ‘glassrooms’ are ‘Whole rooms made out of glass’ and the ‘Tea-cher’ is the ‘one who makes the tea’. ‘Unlucky for Some’ is typical of McGough’s tendency to see the multiple layers and ambiguities of words, expressions and concepts, in a manner which is simultaneously humorous and insightful:
'What do I do for a living? Survive.
McGough thus exposes the shifting and subjective nature of ‘reality’, emphasising that there are no fixed truths or meanings, but only perceptions and interpretations. He also uses this approach in his poetry for children, particularly in ‘On and on ….’ which occurs repeatedly throughout Lucky (1993): ‘Is a bad speller / one / who casts a wicked spell? / Is a shop-lifter / a giant / who goes around lifting shops? […]’ This is not merely for entertainment value - McGough encourages children to question the world around them and not take things at face value, in the same way that he himself questions and subverts society, reality and life itself.
For McGough, therefore, poetry is a form of subversion, and this can be serious or humorous, or both simultaneously. In his poetry for adults, his use of humour has evolved throughout his career, and his deceptively simple, quirky and witty style incorporates all manner of serious issues and perceptive insights. Even some of the earlier works, such as Summer With Monika (1967; revised 1978) and Holiday on Death Row (1979), are acutely satirical. Geoff Sadler comments on McGough’s particular brand of satire:
'His writing tends more to amusement than to bitter anger, and polemics from him are few and far between, usually made from a humanitarian rather than a political standpoint.' (Chevalier, Contemporary Poets, 1991)
McGough may avoid anger and bitterness, but he does nonetheless take a sceptical approach to life, using dry humour as a way of coping with life’s inevitable disappointments. Perhaps the most apt example of this is the title of his 1999 collection, The Way Things Are. The title poem articulates the voice of a well-meaning father, pouring ‘cold water’ over his child’s imaginative questions:
'No, the candle is not crying, it cannot feel pain.
However, though the poem may be read as cynical, the child’s magical and subversive approach to life continues, constantly challenging the father’s limited perspective.
Here and there McGough addresses tragedy in his poems. One example is ‘What Happened to Dorothy’ (also from The Way Things Are), in which the careful and deliberate phrasing of the title subverts the familiar rhetorical question of ‘Whatever happened to …?’ by offering an answer, and a tragic one at that. The speaker reminisces over an old photo of himself as a page-boy at a wedding, accompanied by seven-year-old bridesmaid Dorothy. In works such as this, McGough’s deceptively light touch, dry understatement and lack of detailed elaboration give the poems acute poignancy and depth of feeling by jolting the reader:
'That’s Dorothy, Maid-of-Honour.
She never would be, though.'
The Way Things Are is one of various later works in which McGough displays a deeper compassion, with more of the humanitarian impulse which has always been present. This is not to imply that his use of sardonic humour is any less in evidence, but McGough has gradually become more confident about addressing serious issues, as he comments himself:
'If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you’ve done a comedy performance but because you’re talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul. I hope people will feel better for it.' (The Guardian, 14 November, 2005)
In 2002, McGough published Everyday Eclipses, which combines poems about his own childhood, his experiences of parenthood, nostalgia for the past and musings on death. In 1999, he had been commissioned to write a poem about the total eclipse of the sun. The result was ‘Everyday Eclipses’, which became the title of his 2002 collection. In this poem, McGough chose to examine a myriad of everyday experiences rather than the total eclipse itself - in other words, he celebrates the world of ordinary life, its trivialities and its profundity: ‘The hamburger flipped across the face of the bun / The frisbee winning the race against its own shadow.’ Ultimately, however, ‘Everyday eclipses another day’, ‘One death eclipses another death’ and ‘One birth eclipses another birth’. McGough adopts a similar focus on ordinary life in ‘Reasons for Winning’, the poem he wrote for the 2006 World Cup, in which he rouses the team to ‘Win it for the late train and the overcrowded bus / Win it for granny who can’t understand the fuss […] Win it for the ordinary man in the street […]’ Although McGough’s style has matured and developed over the years, he remains true to his roots as an accessible, down-to-earth poet who is not only in touch with the world of the commonplace and the ordinary person, but celebrates it with an unsentimental warmth and affection.
McGough’s Collected Poems was published in 2003, followed by his autobiography, Said and Done in 2005. He also presents Poetry Please for BBC Radio 4.
Elizabeth O’Reilly, 2008
Further reading on this site
Contact information
Related links
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
