Great poemsA lovely collection, you can return to it day after day and carry on enjoying them ater multiple readings.
Happy poems are no laughing matterI love this anthology! It does what it says on the tin; it's a collection of poems about happy things: moments, memories and moods mostly. Surprisingly, there's very few comic poems. Instead, it's a rather moving collection, mostly focussed on "kissing the joy as it flies", and there's almost a pleasant ache induced by sharing some of these moments.
The choice of poets is wide ranging and goes from Chaucer to Derek Walcott. Some of the entries are predictable and easily found elswhere (eg "sumer is icumen in" and "Jenny Kiss'd Me"), but it's always comforting to read these old favourites again. There was enough that was new to me in here to merit the purchase. Look out for "Red Boots On" by Kit Wright, "Faure's Second Piano Quartet" by James Schuyler and "Ice on the Highway" by Thomas Hardy, which I thought were delightful poems that are not found in every anthology.
Slightly self-indulgent and more contemplative than happy
Wendy Cope's own poems are are an endless source of comfort and laughter, so she is well qualified to choose happy poems. But her '101 Happy Poems' make up an uneven and somewhat unimaginative selection. Though her own work is so fresh and modern, Cope brings in a surprising number of old stalwarts - My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, Glory be to God for Dappled Things - although there are also lesser-known voices. The pleasures of eating, drinking, slipping on the ice, even of going bald are covered. Yet many of the poems are not strikingly happy. Cope's definition of 'happy' is blurred, and strays into 'contemplative' - for instance, Robert Frost's Mowing, Wordsworth's Daffodils or Keat's On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer. If you want to be re-acquainted with these, then buy this anthology. The cover, by the way, is awful. Surely Faber can do better than to ape the Harper Collins '101 poems' series which are much more daring and enjoyable.
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