Poetry review – NEW & COLLECTED POEMS: Ian Pople looks back over Jeffrey Wainwright’s poetic career as summed up in this major retrospective volume
New & Collected Poems
Jeffrey Wainwright
Carcanet
ISBN: 9781800175655
£20.
There is a mode of address in Jeffrey Wainwright’s poetry which has crept into his work. This, from Wainwright’s 2012 book-length sequence, The Reasoner,
Hotshit philosopher, just tell me what
is always veiled, or, at least, you know, the kind of things?
or what on earth are all our interpretations?
That address is not simply the use of the expletive, or the italics, or even the sprinkling of commas. It certainly is those things, but it is also the use of the first person and the second person. There is both an involving of the narrator of the poem but also the person addressed in the poem itself. There is also the sense that the second person ‘you’ is not only the reader; here the reader his held in the seemingly throw-away, ‘you know.’ That ‘you’ is also the ‘hotshit philosopher,’ so the second person is clenched in the actual ‘you’ who is brought into the narrative of the poem. I use the word ‘clenched,’ advisedly as there is something quite vehemently centripetal in the way Wainwright works the dynamics of the poem. The reader might think that they are being invited in, but the invitation is very much on Wainwright’s own terms.
Wainwright’s career began in 1970 with his pamphlet, The Important Man, from the pamphlet publisher, Northern House. In 1970, Wainwright was an editor at Northern House, which had been established at the University of Leeds in the 1960s by Jon Silkin and where Wainwright was a student. Silkin published poets who came to be associated with this ‘Leeds school.’ These poets included Silkin himself, Ken Smith and Geoffrey Hill, who was lecturing at the University of Leeds during this period. This connection with Geoffrey Hill is often remarked upon in discussions of Wainwright’s early work. And Wainwright later published a book on Hill.
It is in Wainwright’s first full collection, Heart’s Desire, published by Carcanet in 1978, that we see the Hill influence most fully. There are sequences in Heart’s Desire which almost mimic Hill’s own reworking of the materials of history. This is the opening poem of both that book and this new collected,
Above her face
Dead roach
Stare vertically
Out of the canal.
Water fills her ears,
Her nose her open mouth.
Surfacing, her bloodless fingers
Nudge the drying gills.
from, 1978 I / The Mill-Girl
The adjectives ‘dead,’ ‘open,’ ‘bloodless,’ ‘drying,’ aren’t surprising; they don’t put their nouns in a new light. But this quiet, unadorned style with the short lines if not quite enactive, is, pun intended, immersive. That clipped style runs through much of Heart’s Desire. And the subjects of that style are often the dead or the living in history; people in carefully evoked worlds.
That sense of the evoked world is particularly true of the sequence, “Thomas Müntzer” which depicts the life of the eponymous subject. Müntzer was, as a note makes clear, ‘a Protestant reformer in the early years of the German Reformation. He was a radical and visionary.’ Wainwright’s sequence is an evocation of Müntzer’s visionary interaction with the world.
I feel the very earth is against me,
Night after night she turns in my sleep
And litters my fields with stones.
I lie out all summer spread like a coat
Over the earth one night after another
Waiting to catch her. And then
She is mine and the rowan blossoms –
His black roots swim out and dive to subdue her –
His red blood cracks in the air and saves me.
Here, it is the verbs that move the description into the visionary; the way the earth ‘turns in my sleep,’ ‘litters my fields with stones,’ the roots of the rowan are personified with the possessive ‘his’ and then ‘swim out and dive to subdue her.’ The rowan then has ‘red blood’ that ‘cracks in the air and saves me.’ Wainwright here makes Müntzer both in and of the earth and also gives him an inner and outer life that engages with that earth.
It was on the basis of Heart’s Desire that Wainwright was included in 1982, in Morrison and Motion’s still controversial Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. His inclusion was as part of a small group of outliers which included fellow Leeds poet, Tony Harrison and the Scot, Douglas Dunn.. This group was not part of the London/Oxbridge nexus that many of the male poets belonged to, apart from the poets from Northern Ireland. And Wainwright was the sole representative from Manchester’s Carcanet, although Andrew Motion had originally been published by them.
In 1984 came Wainwright’s second full collection, intriguingly called Selected Poems. This collection, too, contained its share of history poems. The lesson Wainwright further seemed to have learned from Hill was, when dealing with history, to both go big, but also to particularize. As in this from Wainwright’s ‘A Hymn to Liberty,’
Count all the miner’s hours, all his breathing
To the point of light.
A scud of air across the water’s open face;
A child dabbles the flats of her palms
And laughs as she watches their play.
Each tree its silence breaks.
The reader is first asked to perform a rather abstract action, to count the miner’s hours, but then witness the miner’s breathing in those hours as, perhaps, the miner himself counts down to surfacing. That surfacing is evoked with the description of the child. But then the camera whips out to show the trees as their sound appears. What’s striking here are the juxtapositions, the ‘breathing to the point of light,’ the ‘scud of air across the water’s open face,’ and the silence that the trees then ‘break.’ There is a deep emotional juxtaposition between the miner and the child. We might ask for such juxtapositions from our poetry but we often don’t get them. The juxtapositions may seem fleet and unexpected ‘miner-water-child-tree’ but Wainwright makes them work; they do not jar.
In 1994 came The Red-Headed Pupil. This is both an extension of and a development from the poems in Heart’s Desire and the Selected Poems. That book is, essentially, a sequence with the book’s title. The poems are each twelve lines divided into verse paragraphs of three, four and five lines in length. The title sequence begins with a prologue in which Wainwright addresses his daughter, Holly,
Holly, how far are you from dying,
how far from ever dying! Such a head
of hair, a real bonfire flaming in the street,
happy in your skin, at least as much as
most of us could hope to be
That kind of address gestures, perhaps, to the kind of address I noted at the beginning of this review. When we break into the sequence itself, there is much more of the situated, historical depiction that we found in his first books. In fact, the sequence almost echoes ‘The Mill Girl’ from above,
In some river, any day of the week,
some figure bumps against the bridge-pile
and is left as the current passes.
We can notice here a change in the tone of Wainwright’s poetry. It is much plainer; we might notice the repeated word ‘some,’ to emphasize the quotidian. The next section begins as follows,
For this bridge the firemen have a drill set.
Though the channel is wadeable to the bar,
then they are in the full, deep-cut race
so must be prepared up to spec, their skill
tallied to the job in hand
The language is not quite reportage but the poem makes sure we are in an empirical reality. And Wainwright’s use of words like ‘spec,’ and ‘tallied,’ ensure that the register and the reality described are yoked in the language. It is possible that the note here comes from Wainwright’s reading of Roy Fisher of whom he was an admirer and friend. The rest of the poem moves from the body in the water to a forensic examination of, firstly, that body, and then a narrative built around Rembrandt’s famous picture of ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.’ Wainwright appears to both position himself as the corpse dissected by Dr Tulp (and to use memories of his own childhood in wartime Stoke as the memories of that corpse) and also as a pupil, the ‘red-headed pupil’ of the title, who is trying to follow the dissection. In all of this is a meditation on what it means to be an individual and also what it means to be free as that individual somewhat trapped inside that body.
The need to meditate on what it means to be oneself reached a temporary apogee in Wainwright’s 2012 book-length sequence, The Reasoner. Here, too, the narrator can ‘perch’ in the identities of others. However, it is clear that ‘the reasoner’ in question is mostly Wainwright himself. That much is often made explicit in the references in the Stoke-on-Trent of his childhood. The quotation cited at the beginning of this review comes from The Reasoner. And, although much of the book contains the kind of dialogic language and address of that citation, the book interrogates appearance and our relation with the ‘real’ world, it is tempting to say, within an inch of its life. There are 95 free verse sections and some are, perhaps, more ‘captivating,’ than others. However, the final sections, where Wainwright offers vignettes of the tragedies of others are often very moving, as in these lines from the penultimate, section 94,
May she who grieves – he left after lunch,
at 3 he lay crushed in the field –
smile at one small thing and at length at another.
May there be dancing in the piazza!
May there be fruit upon the vine (literally).
For this is not a wicked but a hard world,
and people struggle, without a scheme of things,
and deserve release. That’s it, willing it so.
Those lines, from 2012, are on page 248 of this copious volume, and the book ends on page 483. A little like his admired, Geoffrey Hill, Wainwright has come in later life to some fluency. In those later 240 pages, he has often gone back to the fine and textured descriptions of events in history. It is in these, it might be suggested, that Wainwright’s real gifts lie; with his particularized empathies. Wainwright often comes across as more of a Watteau than a David. Although attracted to the latter’s commemorations with their dramas and precisions, Wainwright identifies more with the intimacies of the former, the intimacies of living in smaller worlds more circumscribed but equally as necessary and as vital to memorialize.
Oct 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Jeffrey Wainwright
Poetry review – NEW & COLLECTED POEMS: Ian Pople looks back over Jeffrey Wainwright’s poetic career as summed up in this major retrospective volume
New & Collected Poems
Jeffrey Wainwright
Carcanet
ISBN: 9781800175655
£20.
There is a mode of address in Jeffrey Wainwright’s poetry which has crept into his work. This, from Wainwright’s 2012 book-length sequence, The Reasoner,
Hotshit philosopher, just tell me what
is always veiled, or, at least, you know, the kind of things?
or what on earth are all our interpretations?
That address is not simply the use of the expletive, or the italics, or even the sprinkling of commas. It certainly is those things, but it is also the use of the first person and the second person. There is both an involving of the narrator of the poem but also the person addressed in the poem itself. There is also the sense that the second person ‘you’ is not only the reader; here the reader his held in the seemingly throw-away, ‘you know.’ That ‘you’ is also the ‘hotshit philosopher,’ so the second person is clenched in the actual ‘you’ who is brought into the narrative of the poem. I use the word ‘clenched,’ advisedly as there is something quite vehemently centripetal in the way Wainwright works the dynamics of the poem. The reader might think that they are being invited in, but the invitation is very much on Wainwright’s own terms.
Wainwright’s career began in 1970 with his pamphlet, The Important Man, from the pamphlet publisher, Northern House. In 1970, Wainwright was an editor at Northern House, which had been established at the University of Leeds in the 1960s by Jon Silkin and where Wainwright was a student. Silkin published poets who came to be associated with this ‘Leeds school.’ These poets included Silkin himself, Ken Smith and Geoffrey Hill, who was lecturing at the University of Leeds during this period. This connection with Geoffrey Hill is often remarked upon in discussions of Wainwright’s early work. And Wainwright later published a book on Hill.
It is in Wainwright’s first full collection, Heart’s Desire, published by Carcanet in 1978, that we see the Hill influence most fully. There are sequences in Heart’s Desire which almost mimic Hill’s own reworking of the materials of history. This is the opening poem of both that book and this new collected,
Above her face
Dead roach
Stare vertically
Out of the canal.
Water fills her ears,
Her nose her open mouth.
Surfacing, her bloodless fingers
Nudge the drying gills.
from, 1978 I / The Mill-Girl
The adjectives ‘dead,’ ‘open,’ ‘bloodless,’ ‘drying,’ aren’t surprising; they don’t put their nouns in a new light. But this quiet, unadorned style with the short lines if not quite enactive, is, pun intended, immersive. That clipped style runs through much of Heart’s Desire. And the subjects of that style are often the dead or the living in history; people in carefully evoked worlds.
That sense of the evoked world is particularly true of the sequence, “Thomas Müntzer” which depicts the life of the eponymous subject. Müntzer was, as a note makes clear, ‘a Protestant reformer in the early years of the German Reformation. He was a radical and visionary.’ Wainwright’s sequence is an evocation of Müntzer’s visionary interaction with the world.
I feel the very earth is against me,
Night after night she turns in my sleep
And litters my fields with stones.
I lie out all summer spread like a coat
Over the earth one night after another
Waiting to catch her. And then
She is mine and the rowan blossoms –
His black roots swim out and dive to subdue her –
His red blood cracks in the air and saves me.
Here, it is the verbs that move the description into the visionary; the way the earth ‘turns in my sleep,’ ‘litters my fields with stones,’ the roots of the rowan are personified with the possessive ‘his’ and then ‘swim out and dive to subdue her.’ The rowan then has ‘red blood’ that ‘cracks in the air and saves me.’ Wainwright here makes Müntzer both in and of the earth and also gives him an inner and outer life that engages with that earth.
It was on the basis of Heart’s Desire that Wainwright was included in 1982, in Morrison and Motion’s still controversial Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. His inclusion was as part of a small group of outliers which included fellow Leeds poet, Tony Harrison and the Scot, Douglas Dunn.. This group was not part of the London/Oxbridge nexus that many of the male poets belonged to, apart from the poets from Northern Ireland. And Wainwright was the sole representative from Manchester’s Carcanet, although Andrew Motion had originally been published by them.
In 1984 came Wainwright’s second full collection, intriguingly called Selected Poems. This collection, too, contained its share of history poems. The lesson Wainwright further seemed to have learned from Hill was, when dealing with history, to both go big, but also to particularize. As in this from Wainwright’s ‘A Hymn to Liberty,’
Count all the miner’s hours, all his breathing
To the point of light.
A scud of air across the water’s open face;
A child dabbles the flats of her palms
And laughs as she watches their play.
Each tree its silence breaks.
The reader is first asked to perform a rather abstract action, to count the miner’s hours, but then witness the miner’s breathing in those hours as, perhaps, the miner himself counts down to surfacing. That surfacing is evoked with the description of the child. But then the camera whips out to show the trees as their sound appears. What’s striking here are the juxtapositions, the ‘breathing to the point of light,’ the ‘scud of air across the water’s open face,’ and the silence that the trees then ‘break.’ There is a deep emotional juxtaposition between the miner and the child. We might ask for such juxtapositions from our poetry but we often don’t get them. The juxtapositions may seem fleet and unexpected ‘miner-water-child-tree’ but Wainwright makes them work; they do not jar.
In 1994 came The Red-Headed Pupil. This is both an extension of and a development from the poems in Heart’s Desire and the Selected Poems. That book is, essentially, a sequence with the book’s title. The poems are each twelve lines divided into verse paragraphs of three, four and five lines in length. The title sequence begins with a prologue in which Wainwright addresses his daughter, Holly,
Holly, how far are you from dying,
how far from ever dying! Such a head
of hair, a real bonfire flaming in the street,
happy in your skin, at least as much as
most of us could hope to be
That kind of address gestures, perhaps, to the kind of address I noted at the beginning of this review. When we break into the sequence itself, there is much more of the situated, historical depiction that we found in his first books. In fact, the sequence almost echoes ‘The Mill Girl’ from above,
In some river, any day of the week,
some figure bumps against the bridge-pile
and is left as the current passes.
We can notice here a change in the tone of Wainwright’s poetry. It is much plainer; we might notice the repeated word ‘some,’ to emphasize the quotidian. The next section begins as follows,
For this bridge the firemen have a drill set.
Though the channel is wadeable to the bar,
then they are in the full, deep-cut race
so must be prepared up to spec, their skill
tallied to the job in hand
The language is not quite reportage but the poem makes sure we are in an empirical reality. And Wainwright’s use of words like ‘spec,’ and ‘tallied,’ ensure that the register and the reality described are yoked in the language. It is possible that the note here comes from Wainwright’s reading of Roy Fisher of whom he was an admirer and friend. The rest of the poem moves from the body in the water to a forensic examination of, firstly, that body, and then a narrative built around Rembrandt’s famous picture of ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.’ Wainwright appears to both position himself as the corpse dissected by Dr Tulp (and to use memories of his own childhood in wartime Stoke as the memories of that corpse) and also as a pupil, the ‘red-headed pupil’ of the title, who is trying to follow the dissection. In all of this is a meditation on what it means to be an individual and also what it means to be free as that individual somewhat trapped inside that body.
The need to meditate on what it means to be oneself reached a temporary apogee in Wainwright’s 2012 book-length sequence, The Reasoner. Here, too, the narrator can ‘perch’ in the identities of others. However, it is clear that ‘the reasoner’ in question is mostly Wainwright himself. That much is often made explicit in the references in the Stoke-on-Trent of his childhood. The quotation cited at the beginning of this review comes from The Reasoner. And, although much of the book contains the kind of dialogic language and address of that citation, the book interrogates appearance and our relation with the ‘real’ world, it is tempting to say, within an inch of its life. There are 95 free verse sections and some are, perhaps, more ‘captivating,’ than others. However, the final sections, where Wainwright offers vignettes of the tragedies of others are often very moving, as in these lines from the penultimate, section 94,
May she who grieves – he left after lunch,
at 3 he lay crushed in the field –
smile at one small thing and at length at another.
May there be dancing in the piazza!
May there be fruit upon the vine (literally).
For this is not a wicked but a hard world,
and people struggle, without a scheme of things,
and deserve release. That’s it, willing it so.
Those lines, from 2012, are on page 248 of this copious volume, and the book ends on page 483. A little like his admired, Geoffrey Hill, Wainwright has come in later life to some fluency. In those later 240 pages, he has often gone back to the fine and textured descriptions of events in history. It is in these, it might be suggested, that Wainwright’s real gifts lie; with his particularized empathies. Wainwright often comes across as more of a Watteau than a David. Although attracted to the latter’s commemorations with their dramas and precisions, Wainwright identifies more with the intimacies of the former, the intimacies of living in smaller worlds more circumscribed but equally as necessary and as vital to memorialize.