Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

I think Wendy Cope is such a popular poet in Britain because she is not only talented but because her poetry is humorous and understandable, the latter quality often lacking in poems.

She also excels at penning trenchant satirical descriptions of people and events such as, in this collection, “The Lavatory Attendant” who,

“…In overalls of sacerdotal white
He guards a row of fonts. …

Or the lines of people who fill the streets on state occasions:

“…
In Dundee and Penzance and Ealing
We’re imbued with appropriate feeling:
We’re British and loyal
And love every royal
And tonight we shall drink till we’re reeling.”

The poetry in this book is not all happy…

“How like a sprinter you have turned and run
From me, who’d loved show more you almost half a year.
The world’s become a fridge, there is no sun,
I hardly have the stomach for a beer. …”

Most of it is, however, and this little booklet with its joyful take on life would make an ideal gift (for yourself or someone else!). show less

She has written a version of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" in limerick form. This woman is, quite clearly, a genius at comic poetry. This collection is a bit of a mixture of literary parody and her astute observations about life which form more of "Serious Concerns", and I enjoyed every second of it, even though I'm sure I missed many a reference.

Mediocre as a collection, some are great, some are not, some are mental, a few really funny and satirical. Overall, it felt like a very hastily put together book and I blame the editors more than the author for not giving us a better compilation. Cope is a very thoughtful yet impulsive writer and I do love her style of writing but it really doesn't sit well with me when poetry becomes a string of words rather than making something remotely resembling nuance or sense.

It's a bit startling, really, to realize that "vital" rhymes with "title". You wouldn't say so at first sight, but that's why you need to read poetry, aloud.

Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis has three parts, and there is only one poem in Part III:

Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis

It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem
But I love the title.

It isn't much of a poem, but it does make you smile. That's what many poems in this volume do. There is rhyme and artifice, less beauty and more fun.

While I read a lot of poetry as a student, that was all but over after graduation. I kept buying poetry, but never came to it. My idea was that poetry was exhalted, grand, and all about beauty. The show more idea to read a book of poetry from cover to cover didn't make sense to me. A few talks with a few good friends about reading poetry, and Club Read on LT made me go back to reading poetry, al first mainly contemporary poetry, and recently classical English poetry as well. (I am currently reading the collected poems of Coleridge and some are hilariously funny.)

The poetry of Wendy Cope in this volume is mostly of the tongue-in-cheek, ironic variety. As in the first lines of this sonnet.

Not only marble, but the plastic toys
From cornflakes packets will outlive this rhyme:
I can't immortalize you, love - our joys
Will lie unnoticed in the vault of time.

These poems of Wendy Cope, first published in 1986, were reissued in a special Poetry Firsts edition of quarto hard cover editions in 2010. show less

I don't seek out humorous and/or rhyming poetry, and yet, I found myself greatly enjoying this collection. Cope turns her attention to societial norms (honoring architects more than poets) as well as personal relationships (reading the personal ads). These poems had me chuckling with my morning coffee.Several of her free verse poems really stuck with me as well, including the poem about finding a photograph of her father before she was born:
"If they were strangers
it would calm me -
half-drugged by the atmosphere - but it does more -
ease a burden
made of all his sadness
and the things i didnt give him.

There he is, happy, and I am unborn."

3.5. Didn't like it as much as her second book, Serious Concerns, but still a good time. The Waste Land limericks the titular poem on their own are worth the price of admission.

This is perhaps Cope’s best-known collection (certainly it’s the one I heard of first) and contains all the poems I first encountered of hers; the nursery rhymes in the style of Wordworth and T. S. Eliot are fantastic (and also funny enough that I can’t read them without dissolving into hysterical laughter), as are the ‘Waste Land limericks’. I can’t recommend this highly enough.