Fortified to the power of seven (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Fortified to the power of seven

5:29pm Wednesday 25th April 2007 in Leisure By Jim Greenhalf

Years ending in seven have been significantly positive for the poet and broadcaster Roger McGough.

He was born in 1937; the seminal Penguin Modern Poets volume, The Mersey Sound, was published in 1967; he was awarded an OBE in 1997 and this year the CBE and Freedom of Liverpool came his way. His published books number 67 and he has won seven major literary awards.

His 70th birthday is due on November 9. Next year Liverpool becomes European Capital of Culture, an honour for which Bradford unsuccessfully pitched a few years ago.

Roger McGough has lived longer than Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and George Best. He has earned the right to declare in his poem Pay-Back Time: Lord, let me be a burden to my children For long, they've been a burden to me.

May they fetch and carry, clean and scrub And do so cheerfully.

I met him once, in the top floor study of his Portobello Road home in January, 1988. The hallway and walls going up were, I remember, plated with gold discs from his time as a writer and performer with the comedy group The Scaffold (Thank U Very Much, Lily the Pink). He's moved on since then.

The scruffy halo of hair looks thinner and paler, the dome of his forehead more pronounced. The round frames of his glasses are pale blue. His ostrich-like head thrusts up from an open-necked shirt. Ruffling feathers with wordplay he learned from his Grandma McGarry who, he says in his autobiography, Said And Done, saw "the absurdity in everything."

Let Me Die a Young Man's Death was one of his popular early poems. In it McGough, safely in his late twenties, declared: When I'm 73 & in constant good tumour may I be mown down at dawn by a bright red sports car on my way home from an allnight party Three years to go before that wish for a young man's death may or may not be fulfilled. What worries him most, the possibility of being knocked down by a sports car or finding himself at an all-night party?

"I hope it's coming back from a party. Looking back on parties and pick-up joints in my youth, I was never one for that really. Almost by default you went along because it was expected. You feel you should be there but don't really want to join in," he said.

Roger McGough was never a wild man of poetry, a tear-away mad, bad and dangerous to know. What comes through consistently in both his Penguin Selected Poems and autobiography is diffidence and a characteristic self-deprecation.

That doesn't mean he's boring to talk to. Post-Catholic breast beating doesn't seem to be part of his personality. His mature poetry is rueful, ironic and explores deeper, quieter parts of the pool that he splashed in noisily as a young man. In Defying Gravity he reflects on an erstwhile strong and healthy friend dying from cancer.

Soon now, the man I love (not the armful of bones) Will defy gravity. Freeing himself from the tackle He will sidestep the opposition and streak down the wing Towards a dimension as yet unimagined.

One of his latest, unpublished pieces, A Fine Romance is a love letter to his wife.

"It's about dementia really, the fear of dementia, if I start to bump into things or forget things. The antidote to that was the Let me Die a Young Man's Death" he said.

But that wasn't, isn't, a death-wish poem.

"No, it's about wanting to be always be open to ideas, not fossilised," he added.

This year that 1967 poetry volume The Mersey Sound becomes a Penguin Modern Classic.

"I suppose that means I'll have to learn Greek. I'll be off with Brian Patten doing various things."

That single slim volume has sold more than a million copies in its various manifestations during the past 40 years. A nice little earner, along with presenting BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please and 20-odd gigs a year.

I told him he sounded po-faced on Poetry Please. He doesn't naturally talk that slowly but gabbles in verbal clusters, like a shoal of nervous fish, liable to change direction at any moment.

"They brought me in after Frank Delaney to try to leaven it. I am not an academic, so it has been good for me to learn a bit," he said, meaning the corpus of what passes for English poetry.

Does he learn poetry by heart?

"Never did. Decided early on not to do that. Some poets know their work by heart. Benjamin Zephaniah is dyslexic so he's had to learn his work by heart.

With Scaffold he performed at Bradford University Students Union; he has never played St George's Hall, though. He tends to attract big audiences of mixed age - "not just aged hippies" - including students. He likes that. You'll like him too.

Roger McGough will be reading his poetry and from his autobiography Said And Done at St George's Hall on May 9, starting at 7.30pm. The box office number is (01274) 432000.