Wendy Cope

WC is a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poet who treats everyday concerns, often in demanding forms, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. Her tone is colloquial and she makes these difficult forms look easy. She has taken up cudgels on behalf of the comic and light-hearted in poetry, and argued that such a manner is not incompatible with underlying seriousness. Indeed, her humour often sweetens a provocative statement: about men in their unequal private relationships with women, for instance, or about pompousness and self-serving in the poetry industry. She has reviewed, written for children, edited a number of anthologies, written introductions for the work of others, and, recently, embarked on narrative poetry in the tradition of Chaucer .