Today’s poetry news roundup looks at poet Roger McGough and his latest poetry collection and the thief who stole from a poet before returning the items.

Poet Rewrites Poems Which No Longer Seem Funny

The poet Roger McGough has been re-writing some of the poems that he wrote in the 1970s because what he wrote then no longer seems funny.

A stalwart of the 60s poetry scene in Liverpool, McGough hung around with many of the popstars of the day – the likes of Elton John, The Beatles and even Jimi Hendrix. He even got advice from fellow poet Philip Larkin.

Having dabbled in the pop scene, it is poetry that he is more well known for, and he has just returned from his very first stint at Glastonbury, where he was supporting a dramatised production of “The Sound Collector,” one of his poems. His pop career is, however, well behind him, but he is, as the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy once put it, he is the “patron saint of poetry”, and it isn’t hard to see why, with over 100 books under his belt. It was “The Mersey Sound” an anthology of poetry that brought him to the public eye and eventually went on to become one of the best selling poetry books of all times.

His latest book, “The Collected Poema 1959-2024,” is a retrospective of many of the poems he has written during his lengthy career. However, some of the poems do not appear in the same format as they have previously. While it isn’t unusual for the poet to revise some of his older poems, there are a number that he has felt the need to soften this time as he felt they were too brutal.

McGough didn’t always like poetry, or literature he failed his English literature O-Level but when he heard a recording of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood” he fell in love with poetry. A series of elocution lessons that found him reciting Tennyson also helped to bring the idea of poetry as a form of performance to the front of his mind, and he was particularly fascinated by the works of the left-wing poets Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell. At university, he wrote poetry, something he was encouraged to do by the university librarian, Philip Larkin, who he kept in touch with for many years after he had graduated.

Thief Returns Poet’s Belongings

A house in the Raigad district of Maharashtra, which belonged to the late poet Narayan Surve, was recently broken into. The poet, who died in 2010 at the age of 84, was known for his works, which depicted the struggles of the working class and was very respected.

When the thief realised who the house belonged to and whose belongings they had taken, they returned them. The thief also attached a note to the wall apologising for the theft and saying if they had realised the provenance of the items, they would never have stolen them.

Police are now looking at fingerprints on the items, which included an LED TV, and local CCTV footage of the area in the hope of identifying the thief.