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Rating: 
Summary: Serious Reservations about buying Serious Concerns
Review: Serious Concerns is an 87 page collection of self-indulgent, cynical jabs at the publishers and commissioners, as well at the reader and at other poets. It is one big in-joke that belongs in a very small circle in a depressed part of Britain.
Rating: 
Summary: Pam Ayres of the 90's
Review: This is a brilliant introduction to poetry for anyone wishing to see if it's their thing or not. Wendy Cope is hilariously sarcastic and incredibly cynical, with an uncanny accuracy in the workings of the human brain. Fantastic.
Rating: 
Summary: Written to amuse
Review: This small book of poems is a lot of fun and a good reminder of why poetry is more appreciated in Britain than in America. Wendy Cope doesn't deal with the Big Topics (homosexuality and alienation, rape, genocide or insanity) that dreary Americans like Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath did. She isn't needlessly obscure like Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. She has a sense of humor. In the title poem, she notes the weird contemporary idea (particularly prevalent in America) that poetry is written to make people feel uncomfortable instead of amused.
"Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion." Her topics are often the pompous or the ridiculous. One poem is based on the following classified advertisement: "Man who is a serious novel would like to hear from a woman who is a poem." In this epistolary poem, Cope mocks the book chat language of the reviewers in a correspondence between the woman/poem (self-described as "a tense, assured lyric") and the man/novel (an "important comment on the dreams and dilemmas of the 20th man"). She writes a lot about men who aren't perfect (they snore, they argue needlessly among themselves), but who can still be "good fun." Men aren't objects of contempt, although relationships with them can be frustrating. Men are like buses, she writes in "Bloody Men"-- you wait for a long time, then three come at once, and if you choose the wrong one, you are left stranded. Her poems are about experiences that most readers will have had. She is like her popular compatriots Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin (although a little more cheerful); like them, she doesn't write in order to be placed on a required reading list for the inmates of a literature course. She is the kind of poet who is read without being assigned. An addendum: I enjoyed this book and I'm dismayed at a few negative comments in another review. In this book at least, Wendy Cope isn't nasty to anyone or any profession. The "jabs" ("pokes", really) at publishers take up two poems and are the kind of things that most employees say about their boss under their breath. Second, there are not a lot of poets who are named here and the ones that are, most readers would know (A.E. Housman, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Hilaire Belloc and Wordsworth). You don't need an advanced degree in English lit. to read this book. Cope doesn't put these poets down, she just uses them as a point of departure. In one poem, she says that she's in love with Housman. Third, this isn't a book of British "in-jokes" unless Britain is the only place where men get paunchy, where Christmas is dreadful for single people or where "buds bulge on chestnut trees." And as for the price, a CD by Christina Aguilera costs more.
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