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(Reposting this since I sent it over three hours ago and it hasn't appeared - ignore when it rears its head again later - RcL) >Aside from the gender issue (again), do people really rate Wendy >Cope that highly as a poet? I'm interested because most poets / >critics that I've spoken too seem to dismiss her poetry without >really discussing it as undemanding light verse aimed at a sort of >Classic FM / Daily Mail / middle class audience. Any comments >appreciated.... Just as a good comedian has lines ready to react to the most witty or foul-mouthed of hecklers, Wendy Cope has answers to all the many accusations which have been piled at her doorstep. In an interview in Gerry Cambridge's formalist journal The Dark Horse, a few years ago, she spoke at length about this. She feels most of the bile comes from envy at the fact that Faber publish her. She may be right, since most poets are still convinced that they are Faber poets manqué(e)s and that their ramblings and bramblings are being overlooked, while Faber publish, shock horror!, light verse, instead of 'innovative' or 'spiritual' work. I think it's important to consider a couple of points re the poem posted (which is, as has been spotted, not among her better pieces) - firstly, don't assume that Cope isn't also subtly ripping the piss from the snooty female narrator, who likes to talk at dinner parties. One hopes and assumes that Cope is not the relentlessly urbane and smug narrator of many of her poems. To me, it's a basic response to poetry which in any sense has a narrative structure - to ask what the narrator is saying, followed by, what is the poet saying about the narrator? Secondly, in Cope's work in general, it must be obvious that the words 'men' and 'women' don't stand for all men / women or even men / women in general, any more than you would expect, in poetry from Tonga or Bhutan, descriptions of behaviour to be adaptable to men / women everywhere. Cope's work is firmly rooted in the middle aged, middle-brow middle class of England - even more specifically, maybe, in the London liberal middle class. The problem is that this make-up is too close to home for so many poets and poetry readers. Dirty laundry and all that. It should be noted that Cope hasn't published a book since I was in short trousers (three recent poems in Craig Raine's new journal of London liberal middle class literary delights were fairly forgettable), though her offspring, Sophie Hannah, continues apace - albeit with a slightly different angle on the fecklessness of men. As to whether Wendy Cope is rated, I'd say yes, at least by her bank manager - and we have popular poets who are far, far more crass. I'm told she's an extremely nice woman. Odd how her time in the limelight seemed to correspond with Mrs Thatcher's. Roddy