COLLECTED POEMS, by Wendy Cope
Like Cornish pasties and Branston Pickle, Wendy Cope’s poems are a uniquely English product that’s never caught on in the United States. Over there, she’s an institution, an Oxford-educated intellectual, once said to be in line for poet laureate, who writes the sort of poems almost no one does any longer — ones that rhyme, are frequently hilarious and sell in large numbers.
Cope turned 80 this summer. She has largely given up writing new poems. What we have instead is her first “Collected Poems,” a thick book that reminds us why English readers (and a few of us over here) lost their hearts to her.
One of the best things about Cope’s work is how lightly she wears her erudition. She grew up middle-class (her father managed a department store) and is unimpressed by pretension of nearly every variety. As for inflated literary egos, she has a habit of gently taking the piss, as a Brit would say.
In her first collection, the ideally titled “Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis” (1986), she writes, in a poem titled “Triolet”:
I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They’re mostly wicked as a ginless tonic
And wild as pension plans.
In the same collection, she comments on one of England’s literary lions: “It’s worse than organising several zoos (several zoos) / Patrolling the unconscious of Ted Hughes.” She picks a fight with Wordsworth’s notion that, for a poet, emotion must be recollected in tranquillity. In Cope’s opinion, “there’s a serious shortage of tranquillity” these days.
Cope has a complicated relationship with other English institutions, such as poems marking formal events in the life of the country. (She has written a few of these.) One solution for their persistent triteness was to compose a bit of verse titled “All-Purpose Poem for State Occasions.” Here is the last of its three delightful stanzas:
In Dundee and Penzance and Ealing
We’re imbued with appropriate feeling:
We’re British and loyal
And love every royal
And tonight we shall drink till we’re reeling.
She has written poems criticizing London’s rapacious press. (“She’ll urge you to confide. Resist. / Be careful, courteous, and cool. / Never trust a journalist.”) She has displayed her dislike of photographers, who move into people’s houses for hours, push the furniture around and shine lights in subjects’ faces “to get a better view of their blackheads.”
Many of Cope’s best poems are bittersweet; they deal with love and its endless discontents. Men, for example — how to pick one? “Bloody Men” begins:
Bloody men are like bloody buses —
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.
You have no time to decide, she writes. If you make a mistake, it is sometimes too late to turn back. Another might not come for a while.
People argue about which of Cope’s poems is her finest. My favorite on most days is “Faint Praise,” from her 1992 collection “Serious Concerns.” It is, at any rate, the best of her poems to read aloud. It begins:
Size isn’t everything. It’s what you do
That matters, darling, and you do quite well
In some respects. Credit where credit’s due —
You work, you’re literate, you rarely smell.
Small men can be aggressive, people say,
But you are often genial and kind,
As long as you can have things all your way.
It only gets better from here.
What gets lost in conversations about Cope is how much darkness she smuggles into her poems under the cover of her wordplay. There are poems about depression and health scares and death. She marks a place where Philip Larkin or James Fenton, rhyming poets each, might meet (to single out two American poets of dark wit) Kay Ryan or Deborah Garrison.
Overlooked as well is her subtlety. She consistently tinkers with form in her dexterous poems; you admire the integrity of her workmanship as she deals out sonnets, haikus, triolets, centos and her own translations. She understands how rhyme fixes words in our memories, but she is not a slave to those rhymes; she bends them to ingenious effect.
As a longtime reader of Cope’s verse, I do have some bedrock consumer advice. This new book is not the place to begin. Too many of the previously unpublished poems are slight. Randall Jarrell said that a poet is someone who manages, “in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
Cope was struck more often in the first half of her career. Some of the poems from her later collections can blur on you. A much thinner and less expensive paperback, “Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006,” contains most of what you need. In the meantime, one waits for a career-spanning book of her selected (as opposed to collected) poems. Also worth finding are the several anthologies of humorous poems that Cope has edited. They are ideal bedside reading.
England has absorbed Cope as affectionately as she has absorbed it. Despite its occasional drawbacks, this book is as English as a retrospective of Nigella Lawson’s cookery, and I’m pleased that it exists.
Wendy Cope has an ideal last name. She seems always to know what to say, and what to do, in dark moments. Here is her poem “Loss” in its entirety:
The day he moved out was terrible —
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.
COLLECTED POEMS | By Wendy Cope | Faber & Faber | 491 pp. | $35
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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