Keen eye for the everyday

TO coincide with the Ledbury Poetry Festival, this month’s book group selection is Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 by Wendy Cope, the poet chosen by listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme as their favourite to become poet laureate several years ago. Her poetry, with its wry observations of relationships, is accessible, often humorous and always illuminating. “I don’t set out to write humorous poems,” she has said, “it’s just sometimes my sense of humour gets into them – well, quite often.” It was during her time as a primary school teacher that Wendy Cope began writing poetry: “I was doing a lot of creative work in music and poetry with the children and that was one thing that got me going.” Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (not something she has ever done), published in 1986, struck an immediate chord with readers and has been in print ever since. Among the best-known poems in that book, and included in this new collection, is Bloody Men!: “Bloody men are like bloody buses You wait for about a year And as soon as one approaches your stop Two or three others appear.” Read these poems aloud to yourself, to your family, to your friends and the great appeal of poetry is instantly apparent. As a poet who regularly gives readings, “the way I read my poems is the way I like them to be read,” she says. “I suppose there’s a slightly world-weary tone in my poems and in the way I read them which is appropriate.”