Defying Gravity
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In this evocative and personal collection of poems Roger McGough comes to terms with painful memories as well as confronting fears that are universal. Here he remembers his father in ‘Squaring Up’ and ‘Alphabet Soup’; observes the eccentricities of contemporary life in ‘The City of London Tour’; gives insights into human feeling with the surreal ‘Your Favourite Hat’ and the moving elegy ‘Defying Gravity’; and muses on writing itself with ‘Word Trap’ and ‘The Darling Buds of Maybe’. There are even witty poems dedicated to the chemical elements. Blending the everyday and the magical, his verses sparkle with verbal dexterity, irreverent humour, irony and heartfelt compassion.
Roger McGough was a member of the group Scaffold in the 1960s when he contributed poems to the Penguin title The Mersey Sound, which has since sold over a million copies and is now available as a Penguin Classic. He has published many books of poems for children and adults, and both his Collected Poems (2004) and Selected Poems (2006) are also available in Penguin. He presents Poetry Please on Radio 4 and is President of the Poetry Society. He was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in 2001 and with a CBE in 2005 for services to literature.