Jeffrey Wainwright: 3 books

What Must Happen has concerns which might be grouped under three headings. First there are personal, mainly elegiac poems that recall parents, relations and friends. The second grouping, including the title poem, has poems on wider historical subjects some of which relate to the personal through Wainwright's...

Now in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure...

Quixotic in his hapless drive to know everything in a world where nature itself is elusive, the narrator of these 95 free-verse poems struggles with his impulse to study and think when there is little that can be understood as language can be deceiving and history proposes and then disposes its patterns....