What Must Happen
Published on 28. July 2016
88 pages
978-1-78410-197-8 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the 2017 Arnold Bennett Book Prize
What Must Happen is Jeffrey Wainwright's most intimate and elegiac collection of poems to date, recalling lost parents, relations and friends. Shared childhood memories, and the history of hometown Stoke-on-Trent, connect Wainwright's personal themes to wider historical subjects. A sequence of contemporary hymns to Roman gods depicts Jupiter, 'elbows on the bar, nursing a beer', while a homage to twentieth-century Italian painter Ottone Rosai asks, twenty times, 'What is there to an empty street?' One answer: 'the simply sunlit, / the clearly pure, / the assent to less'. Another: 'plums / so prolific they colour out / the leaves'. Rather than polarising the playful and the solemn, Wainwright's poems examine their complex interactions. Though composed primarily in free verse, symmetries and refrains span the collection as a whole, imparting a tight, vibrant clarity. The poems in What Must Happen are painted with a hair-fine brush, swift and precise, unwilling to rest at an adequate fiction as long as an inadequate truth remains in reach. 'There are these things and sometimes the shadow of these things / but they will not be seen apart.'
What Must Happen is Jeffrey Wainwright's most intimate and elegiac collection of poems to date, recalling lost parents, relations and friends. Shared childhood memories, and the history of hometown Stoke-on-Trent, connect Wainwright's personal themes to wider historical subjects. A sequence of contemporary hymns to Roman gods depicts Jupiter, 'elbows on the bar, nursing a beer', while a homage to twentieth-century Italian painter Ottone Rosai asks, twenty times, 'What is there to an empty street?' One answer: 'the simply sunlit, / the clearly pure, / the assent to less'. Another: 'plums / so prolific they colour out / the leaves'. Rather than polarising the playful and the solemn, Wainwright's poems examine their complex interactions. Though composed primarily in free verse, symmetries and refrains span the collection as a whole, imparting a tight, vibrant clarity. The poems in What Must Happen are painted with a hair-fine brush, swift and precise, unwilling to rest at an adequate fiction as long as an inadequate truth remains in reach. 'There are these things and sometimes the shadow of these things / but they will not be seen apart.'
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
File size
0,62 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-197-8 (9781784101978)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Jeffrey Wainwright
What Must Happen
Book
07/2016
Carcanet Press Ltd
€16.50
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Person
Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 and was educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He has taught at the University of Wales, Long Island University in Brooklyn and for many years at the Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in the Department of English and its Writing School until 2008.
His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, Heart's Desire, by Carcanet in 1978.Carcanet Press also publish his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994), Out of the Air (1999) and Clarity or Death! (2008), The Reasoner (2012), What Must Happen (2016) and most recently As Best We Can (2020). He has translated plays by Peguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltes' In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999 and among other stage productions is the one by the Actors Touring Company in London and tour September-November 2001. The text is available in Koltes: Plays 2 (Methuen 2004).
For eleven years, 1989-99, he was northern theatre critic of The Independent contributing twenty or more reviews per year. Radio work has included reviews for Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and On Air. His book, Poetry the Basics, was published by Routledge in April 2004, third edition 2016, and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Acceptable Words, in 2005. He has also published many articles on modern and contemporary poetry. He lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.
His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, Heart's Desire, by Carcanet in 1978.Carcanet Press also publish his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994), Out of the Air (1999) and Clarity or Death! (2008), The Reasoner (2012), What Must Happen (2016) and most recently As Best We Can (2020). He has translated plays by Peguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltes' In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999 and among other stage productions is the one by the Actors Touring Company in London and tour September-November 2001. The text is available in Koltes: Plays 2 (Methuen 2004).
For eleven years, 1989-99, he was northern theatre critic of The Independent contributing twenty or more reviews per year. Radio work has included reviews for Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and On Air. His book, Poetry the Basics, was published by Routledge in April 2004, third edition 2016, and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Acceptable Words, in 2005. He has also published many articles on modern and contemporary poetry. He lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.
