Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope's first book of poems and parodies, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, went straight into the bestseller lists. Its successor, Serious Concerns has proved even more popular, addressing such topics as 'Bloody Men', 'Men and Their Boring Arguments', 'Two Cures for Love', 'Kindness to Animals' and 'Tumps' (Typically Useless Male Poets).

Serious Concerns

My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. The Orange provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling and best-loved poets. In poems that can turn from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Wendy Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling - and being - in love to ways to help you deal with a painful break-up or the memories of people loved and lost, this is a book you will want to savour and share with all your friends. 'Wendy Cope's readership, numerous and adoring, is the envy of most poets. Cope's real strength lies not in charm or insight (she has buckets of both) but in the pitch perfect exactitude of her writing.' Sunday Times

The Orange and other poems

My heart has made its mind up And I'm afraid it's you. The Orange provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling and best-loved poets. In poems that can turn from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Wendy Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling - and being - in love to ways to help you deal with a painful break-up or the memories of people loved and lost, this is a book you will want to savor and share with all your friends.

The Orange and Other Poems

Wendy Cope's first collection of new poetry since 2011's acclaimed Family Values, chosen as one of the Telegraph's 15 Best Poetry Books of All Time.

Anecdotal Evidence

Offers parodies of William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson, and humorous sonnets, haiku, and love poems.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

Wendy Cope's most recent collection, her first since Serious Concerns in 1992, extends her concern with the comedy of the examined life ('the way we have been, the way we sometimes are'), and imagines those adjustments to the ordinary which would fulfil our futures, or allow us to realize the golden age of five minutes ago, or weigh the 'out there' of the present moment, where what is in sight is also out of reach. These are poems of well-tempered yearning, conditional idylls which sing in praise of lying fallow, the creativity of daydream, the yeast of boredom, the truths of intermediacy. Wendy Cope's formal tact is alertly present - in triolets, rondeaux, villanelles, squibs, epigrams - small forms whose power to disarm goes hand in hand with her characteristically tart ripostes to the way things (usually) are. This collection extends the variousness of her occasions.

If I Don't Know

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.

Family Values

Features a selection of poems with notes that grew out of the author's experience of meeting her audience, when reading her poems in schools. This is an edition of the poems which identifies the references, verse-forms, contexts and occasions of the author's work, and which offers readers a fresh arrangement of the poetry as a whole.

Selected Poems 1979-2006

Two Cures for Love

Selected Poems, 1979-2006

For more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation's most popular and respected poets. Christmas Poems collects together her best festive poems, including anthology favourites such as 'The Christmas Life', together with new and previously unpublished work. Cope celebrates the joyful aspects of the season but doesn't overlook the problems and sadness it can bring. With lively illustrations to accompany the words, it is a book to enjoy this Christmas and in years to come. With illustrations by Michael Kirkham.

Christmas Poems

Life, Love and the Archers

Poems by Women Poets

Is That the New Moon?

Nicholas Garland

Tells the story of Isis, daughter of Father Thames, who falls in love with a poet and leaves the river to marry him

The River Girl

An anthology of poems by women poets, collected by Wendy Cope. Collected by one of Britain's foremost poets, Is that the New Moon? is a mix of styles and genres by leading women poets including: Grace Nichols, Frances Horovitz, Jenny Joseph, Wendy Cope, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood.

Is that the New Moon?

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch. Here readers can meet the Enid-Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl, the ambivalent daughter, the amused teacher, the sensitive journalist, the cynical romantic and the sardonic television critic, as well as touching on books and writers who have informed a lifetime of reading and writing. Wendy Cope is a master of the one-liner as well as the couplet, the telling review as well as the sonnet, and Life, Love and the Archers gives us a wonderfully entertaining and unforgettable portrait of one of England's favourite writers.

The Orange

Engaging and fun, this poem is about the school day and is written by award-winning contemporary poet Wendy Cope. • Engaging and fun, this poem is about the school day and is written by award-winning contemporary poet Wendy Cope. • Yellow/Band 3 books offer varied sentence structure and natural language • On pages 14–15, children can recap the different school activities featured in the poem using a story map. • Text type: A poem • Curriculum links: Citizenship: Personal, Social and Emotional Development

Time for School

Featured in this anthology of funny poems, are Michael Rosen, Brian Patten, Colin West, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling,and A. A. Milne. Some make you laugh, some are plain ridiculous and some are thoughtful but all are here to be enjoyed.

The Orchard Book of Funny Poems

Life Love and the Archers [Signed] Recollections Reviews and Other Prose

In a gloriously exuberant anthology, Wendy Cope sets out to prove that misery doesn't have all the best lines. What makes us happy? In her introduction the editor says of the subject-matter of these poems: 'A lot of them are about love - of lovers, spouses, children. There are also poems about places, the beauty of the natural world and the changing seasons, about company and solitude, about music, books, food and drink, and the pleasure of taking a shower. And there are some religious poems.' Among the more surprising items are the Chinese Po Chu-l on the advantages of baldness, the eighteenth-century John Dyer on the kindly behaviour of his ox, and an unusually cheerful Thomas Hardy enjoying the sight of seven women laughing as they stagger, arm in arm, down an icy hill, Catullus, Chaucer, Clare, Dickinson, Betjeman and Larkin are among the contributors who help to demonstrate that people who believe that 'happiness writes white' have got it wrong.

Wendy Cope

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