Her subsequent collections – Serious Concerns in 1992 and If I Don’t Know in 2001 (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award) – both confirmed her reputation as a classic English humorist whilst also allowing room for poems of a more meditative tone. And yet the clever thing about this poem is that it remains ambiguous: are we being invited to take the female speaker’s words at face value? Wendy Cope’s first book of poems and parodies, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, went straight into the bestseller lists. Long before Bridget Jones sipped her first Chardonnay, Cope was casting a satirical eye over the minefield of contemporary sexual politics: “Bloody men are like bloody buses/You wait for about a year/And as soon as one approaches your stop/Two or three others appear.

Serious Concerns - Wendy Cope - Google Books Serious Concerns - Wendy Cope - Google Books

To be addressed by her baby-name at the end demonstrates the terrible loss of power that old-age brings. 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. Cope taught in primary schools for many years before publishing her first book of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). Mr Strugnell’ is a particularly fine example of Cope’s ability to capture the style of another poet: here, she takes on Philip Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ while filtering that poem through the personality of the hapless Strugnell.Elsewhere she seems to have been going through a more challenging time in her personal life, with many poems revolving around break-ups and general frustration with men, although her alertness to humour prevents her ever from slipping into cynicism. 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.

Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Goodreads Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Goodreads

In 2013, after 19 years of living together, Cope married Lachlan Mackinnon in a register office, although she has stated that she would have preferred a civil partnership. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, struck a chord with its lampooning of literary pretensions and its wry look at contemporary relationships, and has sold over 180,000 copies to date.When Andrew Motion's term as Poet Laureate came to an end in 2009, Cope was again widely considered a popular candidate, although she believes the post should be discontinued.

Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope | Waterstones

British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse (American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1995. In 1998, she was voted the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate.

With the money and resources to dedicate herself to her writing, she quit teaching and began living with Lachlan Mackinnon, a poet she later married in 2013. However, although this is a light piece, it also raises the possibility the those critics and editors mentioned in the penultimate line are more conservative and risk-averse than they were in the late nineteenth century (curiously enough, though, when Dickinson’s poems were first printed the characteristic dashes were removed to make her poetry more conventional in its use of punctuation). This is a seemingly simple poem in everyday colloquial language, but it explores some serious themes. Her book choice was The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans, her luxury item was writing materials and her favourite track was Bach's " Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D minor".