Legacy’, ‘Names’, ‘For My Sister, Emigrating’ and ‘Leaving’, for example, consider the theme of leaving or being left with a subdued tone. Discover more contemporary poetry with our pick of Carol Ann Duffy’s best poems and more poetry with these classic short poems by female poets and these great sonnets written by women. As well as the lighter and more well-known examples, her work is also self-reflective in that it shows a concern for the writing process and for writing poetry in particular.

Wendy Cope | Poetry Foundation Wendy Cope | Poetry Foundation

The past two decades have led to a sense of contentment, along with a confrontation with depression, to take the main stage in If I Don’t Know, Family Values, and Anecdotal Evidence. In 1995 she won the American Academy of Letters Michael Braude Award for Light Verse and in 1999 she was awarded a Hon.

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.

Serious Concerns (Faber Poetry): Cope, Wendy: 9780571352333 Serious Concerns (Faber Poetry): Cope, Wendy: 9780571352333

Three haiku from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, where they are presented as being written by the (fictional) Tulse Hill poet Jason Strugnell, were set by the composer Colin Matthews in 1990 as Strugnell's Haiku. Dr Rowan Williams is a well known fan of her work, writing that: "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets, and says a lot of extremely serious things". This is a seemingly simple poem in everyday colloquial language, but it explores some serious themes. I do agree with many other readers that the poem "The Orange" is a delight, and I can definitely see myself revisiting it when depression makes it hard to appreciate the little gems in life and I need a reminder on how to do so.One of the funniest recurring aspects of Wendy Cope’s early poetry is her parodies (or burlesques, to use a perhaps more apt term) of various canonical works of poetry. It also announced Cope’s remarkable talents for parody, word play, dexterity with received forms, and the use of humor to address grave topics.

Serious Concerns (Faber 90th Anniversary Edition) | Faber

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. Inspired by an advertisement that was placed in The Times by the Engineering Council, ‘Engineers’ Corner’ is the first poem in Cope’s first collection of poems, the 1986 volume Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. is a poet whose witty lyrics and pitch-perfect parodies have gained her a readership far beyond most of her peers. This poem can also be read by a man as "Bloody Women,", because the struggle of finding "the right one" is universal.The book also includes two commissioned sequences, The Audience, written for the Endellion String Quartet, and An ABC of the BBC, commissioned for a Radio 4 programme. All but two of the 20 lines list the way ‘you’ either attempts but fails at self-improvement, or tries to stave off the pointlessness of existence.