A Son of the Rock

faber and faber, 1997, 59 p.

This exceedingly slim volume – 59 pages, some of which are blank – exhibits the problem with poetry as a profession in the modern age. How can anyone possibly make a living at it?

Cope’s forte seems to be satire. Many of the poems here have that intent. In the opener, Engineers’ Corner, she laments the poet’s lot of worldly success in contrast to that of the downtrodden engineer, even if the latter doesn’t get memorials in Westminster Abbey. She also rewrites nursery rhymes in the styles of poets such as Wordsworth or Eliot and frequently inhabits the persona of one Jason Strugnell, a slightly unreconstructed figure from whose viewpoint many of the poems herein are written.

A flavour of her style is given by the first verse of Rondeau Redoublé
“There are so many kinds of awful men-/One can’t avoid them all. She often said/She’d never make the same mistake again:/She always made a new mistake instead.”

On the evidence of this collection Cope presents a fondness for iambic pentameter, and rhyme. The book’s overall title is also that of the final poem and sounds like a euphemism but the poem itself is a throwaway, apparently arising from a dream, and shows the danger of rhyme, as without care its results can tend to the McGonagallesque.

Pedant’s corner:- whiskey (whisky, unless you’re Irish,) primeval (I prefer primaeval.)