For sixty years, Roger McGough has thrilled and delighted generations of readers with his irreverent, intimate and ever-original poetry. The Collected Poems presents the definitive selection of his very best work, from the Mersey-soaked sound of his quintessential Sixties start, through to tender meditations on fatherhood and family, and on to political sendups, pandemic playfulness and brilliant new writing. Here, then, is an unmatched store of warmth, wisdom and feeling from Britain’s most beloved poet.

‘McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings’ Time Out

Just when you are ready to write your first poem, along come the words and cause mayhem! ‘Poems can be like that sometimes,’ says Roger McGough.
Here Roger’s witty poems take you from school and home to places far and wide, and back again just in time to finish the poem you first started.

At once funny and moving, Safety in Numbers is the new collection from the nation’s favourite poet. Traversing new yet timeless terrain with his signature wit and intimacy, Roger McGough brings to life the very strangeness of our times

From lost tongues and violins to rising oceans, from adulterers in lockdown to ghosts in line, we may live in dark times and yet find ourselves laughing. From surprising angles and with unexpected voices, McGough, ‘a trickster you can trust’, reveals the telling moments of our lives.
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PRAISE FOR ROGER MCGOUGH

‘A witty and ingenious chronicler of British life with a deftness and agility that is hard to beat’ Poetry Society

‘The patron saint of poetry’ Carol Ann Duffy

‘McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings’ Time Out

Mr Toad has a shiny gold coin. He gives it to Miss Mole to pay for a room in her hotel. Now Miss Mole can pay Sam Stoat for painting the hotel, and Sam Stoat can pay back Mr Badger … until the coin might just end up back where it started! From renowned poet Roger McGough and Kate Greenaway Medal winner Mini Grey, this is an inspired and witty tale featuring beloved characters from The Wind in the Willows.

‘McGough is a true original and more than one generation would be much the poorer without him’ The Times
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For fifty years, Roger McGough has delighted readers with poetry that is at once playful and poignant, intimate and universal. In his latest collection, he explores the whole gamut of the human experience, from forgotten friendships and family life, to the trauma of war and contemporary politics, wittily showing us who we are in all our shades of light and dark.

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‘McGough has done for poetry what champagne does for weddings’ Time out

‘Memorable and enduring and fresh. Age has not withered [his lines] nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that?’ Sunday Herald

‘McGough’s trademarks: the craft worn as lightly as the crown, the jokes that are something more, the underlying heartache, the acute sense of the way time slips away’ Poetry Review

While up at Magdalen
Spent the time dagdalen.
Moved on to Caius
Became the baius knaius.

‘Oxford Blues’ is one of the many new poems in this expanded and revised edition of The State of Poetry, Roger McGough’s book of short humorous verse which was published in 2005 as part of Penguin’s 70s series celebrating its 70th anniversary. From a poem commissioned to commemorate Dylan Thomas in just 140 characters, which unfortunately comes to an end mid-word, to a pre-emptive erratum notice, these poems show McGough at his inventive, hilarious best – and there are also new line drawings by the author offered at no extra cost.

‘The patron saint of poetry’ Carol Ann Duffy

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.

The BBC has looked back through its rich archive of recordings to produce a poll of the most asked for and most broadcast pieces ever: it is those poems that this anthology brings together here. A showcase, in effect, for the nation’s favourite verse, Poetry Please is a treasure trove for our most requested and most listened to poems of all time. It is a compelling invitation for readers of all ages and backgrounds to celebrate the verse that we care so much about: from new readers to old, from schools to reading groups, this a book for giving, a book for cherishing.