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Wendy Cope |
Thoroughly modern Wendy embraces recycling
Two Cures For Love. Selected Poems 1979-2006.
By Wendy Cope. Faber £12.99 Order this book
IN the past week or three, Wendy Cope has ruled herself out from being the first woman Poet Laureate by declaring the position “archaic”, and by publishing the fourth book of her poems, Two Cures for Love, her “Selected”.
Heaven protect us from her “Collected” if this incessant recycling of the poems that make up Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don’t Know (2001) is anything to go by.
The timing of the two events couldn’t have been more blatantly calculated from the point-of-view of Wendy and her publisher’s more pressing needs for instant media coverage: she got some in The Times, the Guardian and The Independent (with a photo that made her look as tight-lipped and tearful as Margaret Thatcher after stepping out of the role of PM.
No matter. Two Cures for Love is still on the way to bestselling at Waterstone’s, even if it does far less well at Daunts, and the rest of the independents up and down the country.
The story from literary rags to riches is one of the oldest. Wendy the trickster, who is forever tricking herself in reality, fell for the role of “celebrity poet” ever since she first started making cocoa for the emotionally illiterate novelist/poet Kingsley Amis in the mid-1980s. This was at a café in Covent Garden, not far from Amis’s watering hole, the Garrick Club, where he used to meet his chums to gossip two or three times a week.
Making Cocoa, when published by Faber in 1986, contained six anthologisable poems – a very large number for a first or any volume of poems.
My favourite is “Lonely Hearts”. I quote the first two stanzas and the last two to give some of its flavour. Notice the refrains. Wendy is addicted to refraining:
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I’m into music, Shakes peare and the sun.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
I’m Libran, inexperienced and blue –
Need slim non-smoker, under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Please write (with photo) to Box 152.
Who knows where it may lead once we’ve begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
Two Cures for Love, no doubt due to the never-ending recycling of poems from her first three books, contains six more memorable poems.
They are: “The Uncertainty of the Poet”, ripe to be made into a film about bananas by me for YouTube; “Rondeau Redouble”, which begins “There are so many kinds of awful men”; “Bloody Men”, which begins “Bloody men are like bloody buses”; “Being Boring”; “Budgie Finds His Voice”, which is “a parody of the work of Ted Hughes in his demented ‘Crow’ phase”; and “Faint Praise”.
John Horder
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