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Jeffrey Wainwright
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What Must Happen
What Must Happen is Jeffrey Wainwright's most intimate and elegiac collection of poems to date, recalling lost parents, relations and friends. Shared childhood memories, and the history of hometown Stoke-on-Trent, connect Wainwright's personal themes to wider historical subjects. A sequence of contemporary hymns to Roman gods depicts Jupiter, 'elbows on the bar, nursing a beer', while a homage to twentieth-century Italian painter Ottone Rosai asks, twenty times, 'What is there to an empty street?' One answer: 'the simply sunlit, / the clearly pure, / the assent to less'. Another: 'plums / so prolifific they colour out / the leaves'. Rather than polarising the playful and the solemn, Wainwright's poems examine their complex interactions. Though composed primarily in free verse, symmetries and refrains span the collection as a whole, imparting a tight, vibrant clarity. The poems in What Must Happen are painted with a hair-fine brush, swiftft and precise, unwilling to rest at an adequate fifiction as long as an inadequate truth remains in reach. 'There are these things and sometimes the shadow of these things / but they will not be seen apart.'
The Reasoner
In a series of ninety-five poems we listen to the 'Reasoner', a voice that is by turns ardent, despairing and comic. Petty obsessions rub against attempts at philosophical seriousness; vernacular expression vies with an intent deliberation. Above all, the Reasoner is worried. He has cherished the notion that, with thought and study, the world may be understood. But the world remains recalcitrant, elusive even in simple things like the trickeries of light on a spider's web. Language plays tricks, although it may be as complete as we can manage. History proposes and disposes of its patterns. Behind all this there may be a hidden order - and that is both a hope and a fear. Does God help us to understand any of this? Does Art? Is the soul' a sanctuary? The Reasoner, the reader, smiles ruefully and soldiers on, for this is not a wicked but a hard world, / and people struggle, without a scheme of things, / and deserve release.
Poetry
"Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it looks at aspects including : how technical aspects such as rhythm and measures work; how different tones of voice affect a poem; how poetic language relates to everyday language; how different types of poetry work, from sonnets to free verse; and how the form and 'space' of a poem contribute to its meaning." "Poetry: The Basics is an invaluable and easy-to-read guide for anyone wanting to get to grips with reading and writing poetry."--Jacket.
As Best We Can
As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.
Poetry: The Basics
Now in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure from poetry. Exploring poetry’s relationship to everyday language and introducing major genres and technical aspects in an accessible way, it is a clear introduction to how different types of poetry work through the study of details and of whole poems. With a revised chapter on the different practices and ideas in the writing of poetry now, including sections on film poetry and digital poetics, this is a must read for all students of English Literature.
Here on Earth
We are still here on earth. With a troubled sense of wonder, Jeffrey Wainwright's new book witnesses to that earth's ordinariness, profusion and mystery. The collection begins with his beginning, a poem that evokes his own birth: 'Here I Come'. He concludes inevitably with 'Here I Go'. In between are poems that describe and contemplate on the variety of life, ranging from a fleeing mouse to geology and gravity. History features, as so often in his poetry, with the earth's transition from inanimate matter to the fearsome and various place we know. There is a sequence on contemporary Manchester, another on the domestic and wider presence of coal, and a series on the iniquities of the British Empire – histories that connect and contend with one another. Describing this last sequence, Shirley Chew notes the poet's 'preoccupation with words and history', his 'self-reflexive wit' and the 'wry look' he takes at the poet's art itself. He is a master of tones of voice, of registers, of patterns and rhythms, and his characteristic inventiveness is everywhere to be found in this book which touches on so many timely and timeless concerns Here on Earth.
Clarity Or Death!
This poetry collection, whose title is taken from a letter by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, addresses the desire for clarity in knowledge of the world, the universe, and oneself. Five poems are inspired by the work of physicist Richard Feynman, while others ponder infinity, numbers, and the 39-poem sequence "Mere Bagatelle," which explores the assertions of American philosopher Jerry Fodor. Erudite and challenging, yet never straying far from the personal, these poems explore the very nature of ideas and the various ways in which science, mathematics, art, and philosophy illuminate what it is to be human.
Selected Poems
This collection of Jeffrey Wainwright's poetry brings together most of his first collection, a Poetry Book Society recommendation, and much of what he has written since that time. The poems confront a wide range of intellectual, personal, and political experiences.
Acceptable Words
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date critical work on Geoffrey Hill, covering all his work up to Scenes from Comus (2005), as well as some poems yet to appear in book form. It aims to contribute something to the understanding of his poetry among those who have followed it for many years and students and other readers encountering this major poet for the first time.
