Customer Reviews

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There once was a poet named Wendy,
Who I desperately wish would befriend me.
For her out-of-print rhymes
I would give my last dimes,
But Amazon thinks they're not trendy.

The fantastic Wendy Cope, with her glib wit and casual satire, has written a beautiful book -- funny, tender, and sarcastic, she turns the literary status quo (two hundred-odd years of pontificating males) on its head and leaves it hanging. She's just far too clever for the boys and we love it. Just buy it. Laugh out loud.

I will be forever thankful for the day I picked up this book just for a look ,I read one poem then took it straight to the desk to buy. The next day I went back and bought Serious Concerns another collection of poems by Wendy Cope.
There just so damn good. Some are funny. Some are sad. Some are this .Some are that. Some are the other. Everyone I ever lent these books to loved them and then went out and bought their own copies. I cant lend you my copies (lost them moving to NewZealand) but I can recommend that you buy them now.

wendy cope's delightful collection of poetry sparkles with wit and erudition. the highlight clearly being the title poem and the nursery rhymes. the typically sardonic brit humor shines through in most of her poems and make one laugh out loud. who ever thought reading poetry could be such a delightful experience?

however, one does wish there were a few more of her touching and sensitive poems like the one on her lover and the other one about a photograph. clearly the talent is there, maybe she will dish them all out in a separate collection one day.

till then enjoy finding out about the cocoa she made for kingsley amis.

we don't get to see as much of wendy cope in the u.s. as i had hoped, so i ordered a couple of her books from amazon uk. the few poems i had come across of wendy cope's have been great poems. her touch of humor is excellent in those poems. but the poems in this collection are less than stellar. much of the time the rhymes are predictable and uninteresting. her repetition of styles and themes gets old (god knows she must love the villanelle). in this collection her nursery rhyme imitations are phenomena. i can just see wordsworth and eliot writing those. her strength seems to be in mimicry, which she didn't do much of here. i don't know, maybe the poems i like so much came from serious concerns. if you want to read someone who is a better formal poet, and has what is probably the greatest wit of any living poet, check out R.S. Gwynn's selected poems: No Word of Farewell. it's well worth it.

Having read Wendy Cope's poem 'He Tells Her' I was a little dissappointed in this book of her poems.
They are good but some are very similiar in nature.
I enjoy modern poetry and recommend Judith Viorst also a modern poet.