Collected Poems

by Wendy Cope

'Her poetry stands unsurpassed in its popularity and technical accomplishment - there's no better contemporary writer of forms such as the triolet - and in the wit, acuity and seriousness of purpose with which she shows us what it is to be human.' Guardian


This volume comprises the full poetic works of one of our wittiest, most beloved writers, and includes many previously uncollected poems.

When Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was published in 1986, Wendy Cope became that rarest of a celebrated poet who was also a best-seller. Her artful combination of insight and wit made an extraordinary impact in poems that cocked a gentle snook at the pomposity of a literary world hitherto dominated by men.

Through four further collections, Cope has continued to delight her readers while finding a whole new generation of enthusiasts when her poem 'The Orange' went viral. Together these poems catalogue the desires and fears that underlie our ordinary existences - love and heartbreak, disappointment and a hard-won capacity to find happiness, even if only in the form of a poem.. In their profound attention to and encapsulation of the everyday, these poems serve to make our own lives the more remarkable and memorable. Collected Poems celebrates a lifetime's achievement by a poet who has been original and distinctive from the very start, and provides the perfect accompaniment to the trials, tribulations and joys of our all too human lives.

This collection also features Nick Garland's original illustrations for The River Girl (1991).

'Her poetry stands unsurpassed in its popularity and technical accomplishment - there's no better contemporary writer of forms such as the triolet - and in the wit, acuity and seriousness of purpose with which she shows us what it is to be human.' Rishi Dastidar, Guardian

'We can love Wendy Cope's words . . . for the rhymes they reveal but also for the sad truths they speak.' Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

'One has to go back to Byron to find a poet as consistently witty, wide-ranging and technically outstanding as Cope.' Los Angeles Review of Books

'We need not wonder at Wendy Cope's continued, wide appeal. She writes poems that people want to read, and this is how poems survive.' Literary Review

'Wit and heart? Cope's fans should rest assured there are enough gems here with both.' Telegraph

'Wendy Cope's real strength lies not in charm or insight (she has buckets of both) but in the pitch-perfect exactitude of her writing.' Sunday Times

'Her poems are moving, memorable, funny, clever; they alert readers to what it means to be human.' PN Review

'Any book of [Cope's] work is a national treasure chest ... her work has, with care and precision, given us pathways to negotiate the world ... Her Collected Poems is as human as an embrace.' Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 4's The Verb

Genres: Poetry

496 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2024

About the author

Wendy Cope was educated at Farringtons School, Chislehurst, London and then, after finishing university at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she worked for 15 years as a primary school teacher in London.

In 1981, she became Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, 'Contact'. Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for 'The Spectator magazine' until 1990.

Her first published work 'Across the City' was in a limited edition, published by the Priapus Press in 1980 and her first commercial book of poetry was 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' in 1986. Since then she has published two further books of poetry and has edited various anthologies of comic verse.

In 1987 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 the American Academy of Arts and Letters Michael Braude Award for light verse. In 2007 she was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.

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.

She was awarded the OBE in the Queen's 2010 Birthday Honours List.

Gerry Wolstenholme
February 2011

Reviews

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do I care if it's uncool to read
The poems of an eighty-year-old poet
Whose flower garden some say has gone to seed
Ten thousand morns since she began to sow it?
A woman who is unafraid of forms
Haiku ballads villanelles sonnets triolets
Knows they fit not today’s poetic norms
Yet cultivates them nonetheless like violets
I didn’t think I’d have anything in common
With an Englishwoman born in nineteen-forty-five
But one page in I was just like oh man
This Wendy is the greatest poet alive
She writes so beautifully and she’s so clever
Oh I could go on reading Cope forever!

[Chaitanya Sethi · Rating 5 out of 5]

An entire collection is hardly the stuff of 5 stars, and there are some clunky poems inside but the ones that are amazing are worth far more than 5 stars.

[Mark Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

An occasional No.1 hit single such as ‘The Orange’ fails to compensate for a large quantity of substandard B-sides.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly, I read the hardback edition, borrowed from a library, not the kindle edition, but the hardback edition doesn't seem to be listed on Goodreads, and when I type the ISBN number into the search bar I get a poetry collection by W.H. Davis instead. Someone needs to fix this problem...

Secondly, the book itself... Well, now, it seems I made a mistake. I had vowed never to read really big poetry collections again. It's true that I have enjoyed a few mammoth poetry books in the past, such as the collected or complete verse of Edward Lear, Ai Ogawa and Miroslav Holub. The problem with really big poetry books is that, as a reader, I run out of steam long before the halfway mark. This is because poetry isn't meant to be read the same way that novels are read...

I rushed through this volume, however, partly drawn along the easy momentum of Wendy Cope's style. Unlike the other volume of Collected Poems I am currently reading (Laurie Lee's) there is nothing difficult here. It's all too easy to understand and absorb. Cope is a poet who always makes sense and in some ways that's refreshing in the modern world.

The only problem I have is the book's rapid sinking into rancid tweeness as it progresses... I dearly wish I had only borrowed one slim volume of her verse from the library, to be more precise Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, her first published collection, which is witty, wise, a little cynical. This is the kind of thing I was hoping for all through the massive volume, but alas, I didn't get it. Things took a downward spiral very quickly. I am prepared to state that her first collection is her only good collection. Her later poems decay into sentimental panglossian triteness. She is full of love for certain men, she loves memories, she loves religious atmospheres, she is all so wholesome and nice! Only occasionally does something more waspish in her character, a little nastier, delightfully break the monotony of her sickeningly bland weepy-boo-hoo gentle tendencies.

I worked out my frustrations at this huge tome by writing a poem of my own. Here it is:

WENDY TELESCOPE

I went a bit twee at the end
of my poetic career. No fear
of that ever happening to you!

Yes, I went somewhat twee
in my twilight years and grew
great big elephant ears, it’s true.

But nothing can prevent my
books outselling yours. They
are heaven-sent collections
of sentimental pithy reflections.

I can see far into the future
when there poetry elections
and I am voted simply the best
until the end of measured time.

I use my telescopic eyes to
surprise the centuries to come
and I am certain that the deep
affections of the populace who
love simple rhymes will endure.

I am Wendy Telescope, the cure
for complexity, I am the pope of
solved perplexity, I am tweedle
dumb slurping my tweedle tea.

[Peter McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

She’s shallow, she’s English (derogatory), she’s all-too-often merely clever, and occasionally in later collections she’s downright insipid. (‘A Poem about Jesus’ springs to mind.) But when Cope is good, she is incomparable. I have learned ‘Waste Land Limericks’ by heart, it is a poem of such precise, gorgeous intelligence. The understated construction of ‘On Sonnet 18’ puts me in awe of Cope; coming up with the ‘“Yes”?’ on its own is an act of genius, but putting it casually in the middle of the third quatrain bespeaks total confidence and control. She has a greater mind than me or you; which makes it all the more depressing that she doesn’t always enjoy using it, and that she often allows the conventions and clichés of her class and nationality to tell her she needn’t bother. ‘Engineer’s Corner’ or ‘Kindness to Animals’ could be lifted directly from the shallowest dinner party conversation you could imagine, but for the rhymes. Ultimately, being demotic is not a virtue when the demos in question—middle-class, middlebrow middle England—is so uninspiring. Cope has the talent and the brains to rise above it, she often does rise above it, so she doesn’t get points for wallowing.

[Rhea Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s always hard to review poetry because it’s so personal it feels rude, however there’s definitely good poetry and bad poetry, and Wendy Cope writes good poetry.

This is a massive book and you’re probably supposed to dip in and out, but I mainlined it in a few sittings and loved the whole thing even when some of the work wasn’t exactly my taste. There were so many poems it was like being an archaeologist digging through time and seeing what was happening in each decade, from heartbreak in one, to reminiscing about youth and upbringing in another, a very interesting insight into the poets life over the years.
Even though I didn’t love them all it definitely made my life better for the few days I was reading them all, good poetry is definitely good for you. I already liked some of Wendy Copes more famous poems, but I now have so many more to enjoy.

My only gripe is some of the poems need explaining, I didn’t ‘get’ that she was writing as a character for a few of them so perhaps a little explainer at the bottom of the page (like what you get in Poem for the Day) would be helpful if another book were ever published.

[Hayley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an uplifting, no nonsense easy to understand, complete collection of the poetry of Wendy Cope.

I like the poet’s wit and general observations of daily life,love and experiences.

I didn’t like all the poems but the ones I liked I really liked.

Recognition also should go to Faber and Faber who published this hardback volume of works. Produced in chronological order, a complete collection with some previously unpublished works it is a delight to read with its layout. Nice thick pages, good font and spacing either side of text for those who like to annotate.

[Davidg · Rating 4 out of 5]

As expected this is an entertaining and often amusing read. I had previously read a couple of Cope’s earlier collections but this was the first time I have read her later poems and, obviously, the uncollected ones. I particularly liked he revealing more of herself in the later poems and the aging process, albeit with a wry smile. You have to admire her use of difficult forms, such as the triolet with its repeated lines.

[Nicolette Ferris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished this- 2.5. Cope is a witty poet of simple and rhythmic verse. I especially enjoyed her holiday poems but I think my personal preference with poetry is full of deeper meaning. This is very much “what you see is what you get”- which is what some people enjoy! I enjoyed seeing her in Ely reading some of these poems.

[Fran]

What a terror to make it halfway through and realize it's all about failed relationships and alcohol and terrible gendered stereotypes like some old sitcom. Where is the life affirming simple joy of 'The Orange'? I wanted so much of that, and got so little.

I give up. I slogged through 240 pages, I don't have another 240 in me.

[Fionnbharr Rodgers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Playful is the operative word that best describes this book. There’s a delight with words, and an obvious practice when it comes to the limited number of forms employed. Though the ‘voice’ is a little constrained, and not as strong as it could be as a result. There is obvious feeling, but the poet’s holding on us to an extent.

[Colin Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Toys with the rules of poetry all the way through. Such a fine balance of bittersweet, the shocking, the real and plainly funny.