That Awkward Age - Roger McGough - 25/06/09
That Awkward Age is usually attributed to those excruciating teenage years when we hover precariously between childhood and adulthood ... but not for Liverpool poet Roger McGough!
Instead, his stunningly vibrant and apposite new collection of poetry is a study of an even more painfully self-conscious period of the human life span ... the 'slow, macabre dance' of old age.
McGough, who will be 72 this year, contemplates 'that awkward age now between birth and death' with all its inherent medical complications... hospital stays, Alzheimer's, language that 'hallucinates' and, inevitably, mortality.
But typically of McGough, for every poignant premonition of losing his balance, calling loved ones by another name and 'spinning off in all directions,' there is also ample scope for his trademark humour.
Take the marvellous poem Payback Time with its delicious opening prayer, 'O Lord, let me be a burden on my children, For long they've been a burden upon me.'
Like old King Lear, he invites his offspring to 'take it in turns at putting me up. Nice sunny rooms at the top of the stairs With a walk-in bath and lift installed At great expense .... Theirs.'
And then, of course, there are crosswords ... those saviours of the ageing mind. 'Crosswords have you to thank Without them, unfulfilled and blank.'
McGough also makes it clear that he has no intention of growing old gracefully! In Carpe Diem, he tells us: 'On reaching sixty, I decided To live every day as if it were my last But it didn't last' ... 'I tore off the oxygen mask, opened the curtains and sacked the nurse.'
But this collection is not just a contemplation of the ageing process; it is also a chance to join the Foreign Legion, jive in Macca's trousers and plan a prison break.
McGough tackles subjects big and small ... an elegy to temptation, a snapshot of unwashed, grinning street urchins, a tribute to the contact lenses he was never able to master and Mr Blyton's hilarious admonition to his wife that each night in bed he 'felt for your body only to feel the felt of Noddy.'
Perhaps the last word should go to the ode to his final poem, I Am Not Sleeping, a play on the famous funeral poem, I Am Not Dead.
'...get weeping. Fill yourselves with dread. For I am not sleeping. I am dead.'
It's heartening to witness one of our pre-eminent poets on such fine form!
(Penguin, hardback, 12.99)
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