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Amazon.co.uk Review
Wendy Cope is one of the few modern British poets to regularly enter the bestsellers list and, with her book of verses If I Don't Know, it is easy to see why. Cope started out as a teacher and worked for a number of years in several of London's junior schools before becoming a freelance writer and columnist. In 1986, she produced her first book of poems Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which contained various literary in-jokes, her work parodying the style of a number of key 20th-century poets; it was funny, accomplished and unique "light verse"--a term Cope dislikes because she feels that, "it is used as a way of dismissing poets who allow humour into their work".
If I Don't Know is less dominated by both parody and humour, less subservient to the canon and is a stronger collection for it. The trademark skills are still here but a darker and warmer, more personal, more direct style is in evidence as is an abiding concern with love and loss. In "Dead Sheep Poem" a dead sheep ("the skull / and jawbone, clean as carved ivory") is contemplated, violated even, by the just-arrived "person with the notebook". In "Tulips" the pleasure of watching her flowers is overshadowed by the knowledge that they will soon die, "Every day I wonder how long they will be here ... I almost wish them / gone". And a more critical, political note is struck in "Sonnet of '68" and the tender, sad "After Prague": "Hope is a long leash, / drawn in slowly". The last, long narrative poem "The Teacher's Tale" is a moving account of Paul ("He teaches nowadays. / He isn't bad at it.") and his troubled early years, "He got off with a caution ... Vowed silently he'd never steal again". Wendy Cope is an eminently readable, intelligent and always sympathetic poet and this is another fine collection of her work. --Mark Thwaite
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The comic brilliance and formal skills which propelled Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns into the bestseller lists are much in evidence here. But a softer, lyrical voice, also present in the earlier books, is given more room to develop in poems about gardens and contentment and the poignancy of having something to lose. If I Don't Know ends with a longer poem, a moving narrative called 'The Teacher's Tale'. Fireworks Poems (from If I Don't Know) I Faster and faster, They vanish into darkness: Our years together. II Write it in fire across the night: Some men are more or less all right.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
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60% buy the item featured on this page: If I Don't Know £5.97 |
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16% buy Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems, 1979-2006 £5.20 |
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13% buy Serious Concerns £5.39 |
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7% buy Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis £5.39 |
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