Available Light

I've finished reading Roger McGough's Collected Poems and I'm now part way through his Autobiography, Said and Done . He handles prose as well as he does verse. It's lively, funny, witty, wise stuff covering a particularly interesting period: the Mersey scene of the 60s and beyond of which he was an integral part. Before he gets to that bit though, near the beginning, speaking of his boyhood Catholicism he has this to say: " The unimaginable force that governs us, the benevolent energy behind all we see and do, has been oversimplified in the excitement of evangelism, and in their attempts to personalise God, artists have anthropomorphised a concept that is beyond human comprehension, so many of us have come to reject religion. Except on those evenings as the light drains away into the horizon, and the old questions rise up again and we lift up our eyes from the ground and search for answers beyond the stars. " (Said and Done p41) I had my Christian beginnings ...

When I was growing up we had plenty books in our house but not a lot of poetry. In fact, I doubt if we had any. At school, poetry was the rhyming stuff you had to learn off by heart about the boy standing on the burning deck when all around had fled and the highwayman who came riding, riding, riding. I have the sort of memory which could get the poem pretty much off perfectly with one or two readings on the day before the teacher asked for a recital, but which let the RAM get overwritten by next Tuesday, so none stuck around for long. This meant poetry never meant much to me through all my childhood and teen years. One man changed all that. Roger McGough, the first poet I ever read for the sheer pleasure of it. In my late teens I discovered him. He was (is), one of the Liverpool poets . He was a little older than me, but definitely of my generation. He was in a band called The Scaffold, whose other members counted among themselves Paul McCartney's brother. He wrote about family lif...