Family Values

From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of ageing she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.

Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986. 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. Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 was published in 2008.

Wendy Cope's fourth collection of poems, Family Values reflects on childhood, love and getting older, from the vantage of a poet in the prime of her art. 'Wendy Cope's readership, numerous and adoring, is the envy of most poets. It is easy to assume we know why this is. After all, the poems in Family Values, like those from previous collections, are often funny, and deliver their emotional intelligence in memorable bursts of pleasure. Yet Cope's real strength lies not in charm or insight (she has buckets of both) but in the pitch-perfect exactitude of her writing.' Fiona Sampson, Sunday Times 'Wendy Cope's technical brilliance is widely acknowledged, but what is more impressive is the ease with which form and content become one in her poems . . . Wendy Cope stores experience in her triolets, sonnets, pantoums and villanelles like honey in the beautiful architecture of a hive.' Helen Dunmore, The Times 'Written with the deceptive simplicity of all Cope's work, but also electric with emotion that ranges from anger and fear to sometimes wounded love ... [she writes] in the plainest of plain language, in poems with fabulously complicated rhyme schemes (sonnets, villanelles, and even the odd pantoum) but which shine with the simplicity of a ballad, or a song. Many are about death and the fear of dying. Some brought tears to my eyes . . . At her best, Wendy Cope is as good as Larkin. Write it in fire across the night: Wendy Cope is much more than all right.' Christina Patterson, Independent

Stunning new edition of Wendy Cope's charming collection, Family Values. From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of ageing she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.

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