Description
From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of ageing she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.
Insistence 
Words the Turtle Taught Me 
Dog Poems 
Luck Is the Hook 
Pretend You Don't Know Me 
Isn't Forever 
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats 
The Handle of the Door 
Carnac (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets)