My first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, has featured on a couple of A-level syllabuses in recent years. When I first learned about this I was pleased to have been chosen by the examination boards but I did have some doubts about the suitability of the book for school pupils. It includes a number of parodies and other literary jokes that can’t mean much to readers who haven’t encountered the works they refer to. Sixth-form students might have read Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot but I didn’t think many of them would be qualified to appreciate a parody of Craig Raine or Geoffrey Hill.
Some of my visits to schools confirmed these misgivings. In one school the pupils had been encouraged to look in my poem ‘Budgie Finds His Voice’ for evidence of my attitude to environmental issues. They hadn’t understood that the poem is a parody of Ted Hughes. When I explained this they were disappointed and tried to argue that it might, none the less, say something about Wendy Cope’s views on pollution and global warming. I had to be very firm. And I was uncomfortable, because the last thing I want to do is undermine teachers in front of their students.
The idea for this book grew out of that experience and others like it. It seemed to me that some notes would be helpful to teachers and students, and might be appreciated by other readers too. Some teachers and other readers suggested that a wider selection of my work in one volume would be useful, so I have chosen poems from all three of my collections, together with a few new ones. I’ve also included a small number of poems that, for one reason or another, were omitted from earlier books but now seem to me worth publishing here.
The usual practice, when putting together a selection of one’s poems, is to group together poems that originally appeared in the same collection. I didn’t want to do that. My collections are miscellanies. Keeping poems together just because they originally appeared together would have made no sense and I am glad of the opportunity to rearrange them here. Anyone who wants to know which book a poem first appeared in can find that information in the notes.
When my second and third books were published some reviewers, understandably assuming that all the poems were new, came to erroneous conclusions about my development. In fact, both those books included poems that could have been in an earlier volume. The notes to this book say when each poem was written. Now and again, going through an old notebook, I find a poem I never got around to typing out but which seems to me worth publishing. Then there are poems that got typed but subsequently forgotten because I decided they were no good. Occasionally, looking at such poems years later, I realise I was wrong. For example, ‘Names’, published in Serious Concerns (1992), was written in the early 1980s and spent a decade in a file labelled ‘Failures’ because the first person I showed it to didn’t like it. That person was not my editor at Faber – the poem didn’t get as far as being considered for inclusion in my first book. But at least I didn’t throw it away.
Since I easily lose confidence in my work, I have been fortunate in having editors who were willing to spend time helping me decide what to publish. Craig Raine worked with me on the first book, Christopher Reid on the second, and Paul Keegan on the third (and on this selection). I thank them for their patience and their advice. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Blake Morrison, whose evening classes at Goldsmiths College I attended in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Blake’s excellent teaching and his encouragement were of great importance in helping me to become a publishable poet. Thanks, too, to Lachlan Mackinnon, for re-reading many of my poems and helping me put this book together.
Wendy Cope