LIVERPOOL poet Roger McGough is poetry royalty these days. His latest collection, It Never Rains, is an expanded edition of The State Of Poetry, the volume of short humorous verse he first published in 2005 as part of Penguin's 70th anniversary celebrations.

It Never Rains contains lots of new drawings and plenty more new poems, such as Oxford Blues: "While up at Magdalen/Spent the time dagdalen/Moved on to Caius/Became the baius knaius."

The much-anthologised McGough signature style is everywhere. There's the relentless punning: "My wife bought a fire guard for the living room/Seems a nice sort of chap."

There are the poems about writing a poem and the poetry in-jokes.

In isolation, almost any of these mini-poems can have a haiku-like quality, the very slightness hinting at hidden depths of meaning like a jewel in the sand. But read one after another the effect becomes formulaic and a little tired, like reading a litany of cracker gags.

Poetry is very much a matter of taste, so a volume of light humorous verse will be especially vulnerable to the vagaries of subjectivity. But for me this slim volume teeters rather too precariously on the line between 'light' and 'slight'.

6/10
Review by Dan Brotzel