Even the title of Wendy Cope’s new collection is quietly and thoroughly subversive.Politicians, commandeering our intimacies for their slogans and deforming our language for their propaganda, love to prate of family values. To value something, however, is also to weigh it and know its worth. The families in Wendy Cope’s new collection are unlikely to give much joy to David Cameron. You’re Not Allowed smacks the ears with a drumbeat of repeated lines as it tells of coercion: “You’re not allowed to wonder if it’s true:/ She loves you very much. She tells you so./ She is the one who knows what’s best for you./ She tells you what to do and where to go.”
The use of the pantoum form and of a childlike vocabulary adds to the menace of the lines. The pantoum requires a strict pattern of rhyme and line repetitions; by the end of the poem the reader dreads the inevitable line “She is the one who knows what’s best for you” almost as much as the child must have dreaded it long ago.
Wendy Cope’s technical brilliance is widely acknowledged, but what is more impressive is the ease with which form and content become one in her poems. The couplets of Boarders use a child’s language and the clichés of school life to make a disturbing point about how language becomes action, shielding motive from the perpetrator and making vile acts possible under the cloak of “teasing”. The poem’s narrator claims, in the final section, that she herself “wasn’t teased much”, but then subverts this: “Some older girls decided/ That I used too many long words.” The poem ends with a mordant invitation to judge the lifelong effect of this: “Look at how I write.” Immediately the pared-down poem is flooded with a second meaning.
Wendy Cope is not a confessional poet but she is very candid in this collection. Daily Help is a love poem to a woman who was not Cope’s mother but gave her the unconditional maternal tenderness (“I can’t help/ loving you, you know”) that was otherwise absent. Mrs Arnold is described as a “little walking sun” whose kiss, planted on a teddy bear, is the seven-year-old child’s talisman as she goes unwillingly to boarding school. In Brahms Cradle Song, the poet is haunted by memories of fleeting happiness — a mother singing of roses and silvery light at bedtime — and by the struggle to “begin/ To imagine forgiving her” for almost everything else.
The perfect symbolic family does not last long in these poems. In the sonnet Christmas Ornaments, mice attack a set of straw crib figures, turning Joseph into an “amputee” and obliterating Mary and Jesus. What survives is the deeply personal clutter of small objects that make up the shape of a life, or of two lives lived in common: “Two perching birds, a Santa Claus, a clown,/ A rooster from the church in Santa Fé”. Similarly, in Cathedral Carol Service, the “we” of the poem are not important enough for reserved seats and must perch in the shadows like birds, shivering.
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But it’s the outsider who shares the experience of the Holy Family: “And we can sing/ For the baby whose parents were not important enough/ to have a place reserved for them.”
Family Values is funny, melancholy and devastatingly observant. Wendy Cope stores experience in her triolets, sonnets, pantoums and villanelles like honey in the beautiful architecture of a hive.
Family Values by Wendy Cope Faber and Faber, 80pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134