I picked up the Pocket Penguin edition of Roger McGough's The State of Poetry for only $3 (thanks to my i-reward card at Chapters). Penguin Books is celebrating 70 years of providing "intelligent books at a low price". To celebrate this very special birthday they've release 70 titles at the very affordable price of around $4 Canadian each.

I was looking at their list of titles and they range from personal journals: Gustave Flaubert's The Desert and the Dancing Girls or Albert Camus's Summer in Algiers to short story collections by Vladimir Nabokov (Cloud, Castle, Lake) and John Steinbeck (Murder). I'm also happy to see Penguin has chosen to include a number of contemporary authors as well, like Dave Eggers (Short Short Stories), Zadie Smith (Martha and Hanwell), and Nick Hornby (Otherwise Pandemonium).

Here's one of my favourite poems from McGough's The State of Poetry. Did you know that McGough co-wrote the Yellow Submarine film script for the Beatles?

Children's Writer

John in the garden
Playing goodies and baddies

Janet in the bedroom
Playing mummies and daddies

Mummy in the kitchen
Washing and wiping

Daddy in the study
Stereotyping.

-Roger McGough

The poem is deceptively simple and almost falls into cliche territory but McGough expertly undercuts everything with just one word. Awesome.