Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope , OBE (born July 21, 1945 in Erith , Great Britain ) is a contemporary British poet . She currently lives in Winchester with the poet Lachlan Mackinnon .

By 2006 she edited three volumes of poetry: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don't Know (2001). Some of her poems are written from the perspective of the struggling poet Jason Stugnell. In addition, she worked as a parodist and aimed both at sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney :

My true love hath my heart and I have hers
We swapped last Tuesday and felt quite elated
But now whenever one of us refers
To 'my heart' things get rather complicated.

as well as TS Eliot , whose poem The Waste Land she shortened to a limerick :

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyants distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

Works

• Across the City Priapus Press (limited edition), 1980
• Hope and the 42 Other Branch Readings, 1984
• Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis Faber and Faber, 1986
• Poem from a Color Chart of House Paints (limited edition) Priapus Press, 1986
• Does She Like Word Games? Anvil Press, 1988
• Men and Their Boring Arguments Wykeham, 1988
• Twiddling Your Thumbs Faber and Faber, 1988
• Is That the New Moon? (editor) HarperCollins, 1989
• The River Girl Faber and Faber, 1991
• Serious Concerns Faber and Faber, 1992
• The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1993
• The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (editor) Orchard, 1993
• The Squirrel and the Crow Prospero Poets, 1994
• Poems 1 (contributor) Addison-Wesley Longman, 1995
• Another Day on Your Foot and I Would Have Died (contributor) Macmillan, 1996
• Casting a Spell (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1996
• Marigolds Grow Wild on Platforms: An Anthology of Railway Poetry (contributor) Ward Lock, 1996
• Over the Moon: Championship Football Poems (contributor) Red Fox, 1996
• A Draft of XXX Cantos (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1997
• Dear Future: A Time Capsule of Poems (contributor) Hodder & Stoughton, 1997
• Evergreen Verse (contributor) Dent, 1997
• For All Occasions (contributor) Methuen, 1997
• Funnybones (contributor) CollinsEducational, 1998
• Silly Bones (contributor) Scholastic, 1998
• The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 1998
• The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1999
• The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (editor) Faber and Faber, 1999
• Big Orchard Book of Funny Poems (editor) Orchard, 2000
• Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems (editor) Faber and Faber, 2001
• If I Don't Know Faber and Faber, 2001
• Is That The New Moon ?: Poems by Women Poets (selector) Collins, 2002
• George Herbert: Verse and Prose (selector and introduction) SPCK, 2003

Web links

• contemporarywriters.com