Wendy Cope’s poetry is so popular that faber published her Complete Poems, first in hardback in 2024, then in paperback in 2025 (Upminster Library didn’t have a copy but it did have several copies of books by Pam Ayres). Her poems are easy to read and often witty, and show a mastery of verse forms. They are also autobiographical. Interviewing Wendy Cope.

In a Guardian article she wrote that in the 1980s she had a love affair with a German poet, who gave her a collection of Heine poems, the Penguin one with English prose translations at the foot of the page. I assume it was Harry Oberländer, who died in 2023, as there is a poem by him on page 215, “Lauda”, translated from the German by the author and Wendy Cope. And “Sonnet of ’68” also by Oberländer (which takes me back to my time as a student in Berlin in 1967/68). Oberländer studied sociology at Frankfurt am Main and met Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer. Assuming several references are to him, he wrote his last book without capitalization.

Some poems referring to German are “In the Rhine Valley”, “Sonnet” (A German dictionary on my knee), “Postcards”, “Translation”, “Ich mache die kleinen Lieder” and three “After Heine” (Ich glaub nicht an den Himmel, Ich hab im Traum geweinet, and Herz, mein Herz, sei nicht beklommen).

At first I sent you a postcard
From every city I went to,
Grüsse aus Bath, aus Birmingham, —
…Cards from you arrived
In English, with many commas.
Hope, you’re fine and still alive,
Says one from Hong Kong. By that time
We weren’t writing quite as often.

“Translation” is the one I would quote if copyright permitted: “This is what it has come to”…reading the poet’s latest book, which avoids uppercase, using a dictionary and complaining about the difficulty of German:

…This is what it has come to:
I am seventy. I don’t suppose
I’ll ever see you again.

I was also struck by “In memory of a psychoanalyst” – Cope’s psychoanalyst was Art Couch, whose wife Lotte I knew at KCL when I was a postgraduate.