Poetry Collection: As Far as I Know

Overview
Roger McGough’s As Far as I Know gathers a late-career poet’s quicksilver wit and quiet tenderness into a collection that is both companionable and slyly disarming. The title works as a signature shrug and a credo: certainty is provisional, facts are felt rather than fixed, and language is a net with holes that matter as much as the mesh. Across compact lyrics, comic turns, and reflective monologues, McGough moves between public and private spheres, allowing a joke to open onto a grief, or a domestic vignette to glance off a wider social anxiety. The result is an agile, humane book that invites rereading and rewards reading aloud.

Themes
The collection revolves around doubt and the ethics of saying. Statements lean on qualifiers; truth arrives hedged, tested, and sometimes undercut the next line along. From that stance flows a sympathetic attention to mortality, ageing, and the persistence of love. Memories surface not as grand revelations but as quick flashes, an object in a pocket, a phrase on the tongue, through which the past negotiates with the present. McGough’s civic eye remains open: bureaucracy, media noise, and political cant are teased without losing sight of the people entangled in them. Throughout, language is both subject and instrument, a playful creature that slips its leash and returns bearing something unexpected.

Voice and Style
McGough’s trademark lightness is not light-mindedness. He deploys puns, internal rhymes, and sideways definitions with musical timing, using demotic speech to smuggle in lyric turns. Punchlines often become pivot points: a quip reroutes into a rueful afterthought; a gag leaves a quiet ache. The poems favor crisp lines, nimble enjambments, and the rhythm of conversation, and they make room for list-poems, mock-instructions, snippets of found-speech, and short forms that sting like epigrams. The tone is inclusive and conspiratorial, as if the poet were leaning over to share a small, necessary secret.

Range and Arrangement
As Far as I Know is paced to alternate bright and dark, short and long, public and intimate. A brief comic squib will be followed by a steadier meditation; an affectionate love poem will neighbor a piece that tests the tensile strength of a cliché. This modulation keeps the collection alert and humane, never letting sentimentality settle and never letting satire harden into scorn. Under the surface, refrains of hesitation, “perhaps,” “maybe,” “as far as I know”, keep the reader attuned to the book’s ethics of uncertainty.

Emotional Weather
The emotional register is generous and adult. Loss is present, but without self-dramatization; love is present, but without sugar. The poems accept that knowledge is provisional and still insist on grace: a well-placed pause, an image that lands, a remembered voice that reenters the room. Even when the world’s absurdities are in view, compassion is the tempering agent, so that laughter and consolation feel like neighboring rooms with an open door between them.

Place in McGough’s Career
Coming from a poet long associated with accessibility and performance, the collection reads like a renewal rather than a reprise. It shows how a public voice can remain nimble while deepening its reserves of tenderness and doubt. McGough’s ear for everyday speech stays sharp, but the stakes feel subtly raised: the jokes are better for the risks they take, the elegies better for the smiles they allow. As Far as I Know stands as a poised, inviting survey of what his poetry can do when it trusts uncertainty and lets language do its lightly miraculous work.