Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order. Use code members10.
Summary
Wendy Cope’s most recent collection, her first since Serious Concerns in 1992, extends her concern with the comedy of the examined life (‘the way we have been, the way we sometimes are’), and imagines those adjustments to the ordinary which would fulfil our futures, or allow us to realize the golden age of five minutes ago, or weigh the ‘out there’ of the present moment, where what is in sight is also out of reach. These are poems of well-tempered yearning, conditional idylls which sing in praise of lying fallow, the creativity of daydream, the yeast of boredom, the truths of intermediacy. Wendy Cope’s formal tact is alertly present – in triolets, rondeaux, villanelles, squibs, epigrams – small forms whose power to disarm goes hand in hand with her characteristically tart ripostes to the way things (usually) are. This collection extends the variousness of her occasions.
WendyCope
Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986 and her most recent, Anecdotal Evidence, in 2018. In 1987 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 the American Academy of Arts and…
Read MoreWendyCope
More books by Wendy Cope
Our Poem of the Week is ‘Forty-seven Words’ by Wendy Cope, which appears in Collected Poems.
National Poetry Day is an occasion for everyone to celebrate poetry – in classrooms, bookshops and libraries, at home, onstage …
Our Poem of the Week is ‘Some More Light Verse’ by Wendy Cope, which appears in The Orange and other …
This week's Poem of the Week is 'The Beginning' by Wendy Cope, from her Collected Poems, out on 12 September …
Looking for a book to curl up with by the fire? We asked Faber staff to tell us which books …
In celebration of the publication of The Orange and other poems, we asked Wendy Cope to tell us how she …
Faber to publish Wendy Cope’s The Orange and Other Poems to reach a new generation
Celebrating our 90th anniversary, Faber staff take on the tricky task of selecting their three favourite Faber books.