Serious Concerns

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Wendy Cope’s first book of poems and parodies, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, went straight into the bestseller lists. Despite her slight output, her books have sold well and she has attracted a popular following with her lighthearted, often comical poetry, as well as achieving literary credibility winning two awards and making an award shortlist over a fourteen-year period.

Serious Concerns | Faber

After graduating from St Hilda's College and Westminster College, Oxford, Cope spent fourteen years as a primary-school teacher. A new mood of contentment infuses her most recent collection with poems of domestic celebration like ‘Being Boring’ or the unabashed tenderness of ‘On a Train’: “Long, radiant minutes,/your hand in my hand. She has edited several poetry anthologies, including Heaven on Earth: 101 happy poems, and her poems for children are widely anthologised. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads.Cope began to allude to her battles with depression, a theme present in all of her work, but that grew more evident with each collection. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. In 1998 she was the BBC Radio 4 listeners' choice to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate and when Andrew Motion's term of office ended in 2009 she was once again considered as a replacement. It is this identity — a resourceful woman who interacts positively with those around her — that is the essence of the poem. Once again we have one key rhyme running throughout a short poem and serving as its backbone, if you will.

Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Waterstones Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Waterstones

These two poems demonstrate an awareness of the outsider, which is in keeping with the undeclared premise of being accessible to a wider readership.If you have concerns about how we have used your personal information, you also have the right to complain to a privacy regulator. In a top-ten list of "must read" Cope poems, [16] every one of the top five are from either Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis or Serious Concerns. Elsewhere she seems to have been going through a more challenging time in her personal life, with many poems revolving around break-ups and general frustration with men, although her alertness to humour prevents her ever from slipping into cynicism. Legacy’, ‘Names’, ‘For My Sister, Emigrating’ and ‘Leaving’, for example, consider the theme of leaving or being left with a subdued tone. Wendy Cope is not just a comic poet, and she can often move us with her touching account of falling in love (or, for that matter, out of love, or, for another matter, being single and not having anyone to love).

Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Goodreads Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Goodreads

Cope’s rueful wisdom connects her to the tradition of Betjeman and Larkin, but she brings a fresh female perspective to bear on social and literary foibles. There are quite a few poems about my childhood, a subject I could address with more freedom after the death of my mother in 2004. This poem, written in the wake of the September 11 th attacks of 2001, borrows from a short poem by Emily Dickinson (‘ That love is all there is’), and shows that Cope can affect us deeply while writing about tragic events. Dr Rowan Williams is a well known fan of her work, writing that: "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets, and says a lot of extremely serious things". As we have already mentioned, one of the most fun things about Wendy Cope’s poetry is her fondness for parody, and she is particularly adept at sending up the ‘bad poet’.

Two Cures For Love (2008) is a collection mainly of previously published poems, but includes extensive notes that give some contextual background and dates of when the poems were first written. Containing a generous selection from her three books this recording is a wonderful showcase for the emotional and technical deftness that’s made her work so widely cherished. Her Introduction is useful for the perspective she gives of this collection and the general reception that poetry receives, compared with other forms of writing: ‘Most people can’t be bothered with poetry, least of all with contemporary poetry’. S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem The Waste Land in five humorous five-line poems, making the most of the delicious juxtaposition of the funny and irreverent limerick form and the serious post-war cri de coeur that is Eliot’s poem.

Wendy Cope – Names | Genius Wendy Cope – Names | Genius

While there had been insertions of the topic in her earlier collections, critics and fans generally ignored them in favor of her more cheery poems". Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in.In 1998, she was voted the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate. She has a keen eye for the everyday, mundane aspects of English life, especially the desires, frustrations, hopes, confusions and emotions in intimate relationships. There were a few other poems I liked as well, but on the whole, this is not for me, and that's okay.