Collected Poems by Wendy Cope (Faber, £20)
Nearly 40 years after Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis catapulted Cope to fame, here’s a chance to revel in the work of one of our greatest poets. Favourites like The Orange, After the Lunch and the sonnets of her flailing parodist Strugnell delight anew, while some of the previously uncollected poems are so good you wonder why they haven’t surfaced before. Take Depression: “I can no more cross this room / Than Zeno’s arrow.” Her poetry stands unsurpassed in its popularity and technical accomplishment – there’s no better contemporary writer of forms such as the triolet – and in the wit, acuity and seriousness of purpose with which she shows us what it is to be human.
Eat the World by Marina Diamandis (Canongate, £16.99)
Diamandis, a musician, describes the poems in her debut collection as “strange stories” that refused to become songs. The persona-driven approach that has informed many of her lyrics is used here, the character an unmoored rock star. The pose works best when hitting a note of self-mocking awareness, such as in Pink Elephant: “Can somebody save me? / You’re not meant to say that, though. / You’re meant to say ‘Only I can save myself!’” There’s brilliant phrasemaking (“the thin fizz of desperation”) and sharp observations (the purpose of emotions “is to move, be felt / as energy in motion”) throughout, but a tendency to overexplain softens the bite.
