In The Failed Idealist’s Guide To The Tatty Truth Fergus McGonagal takes as his starting point Ogden Nash’s notion of a poem being an essay which rhymes. With this in mind he targets the unsentimental truth about parenthood, pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness, pomposity, and the idealism of youth giving way to the disappointment of middle-age in poems that are performance-friendly rhyme-fests beneath whose manic laughter there lies a grain of truth. Always comic, occasionally erudite, sometimes ranting Fergus is equally comfortable writing formal poetry some of which, remarkably enough as it turns out, is ideally suited to performance.