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 prolifific 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, swiftft and precise, unwilling to rest at an adequate fifiction 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.’
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Jeffrey Wainwright was born in 1944 in Stoke-on-Trent, England. He was educated at Longton High School and the University of Leeds, and went on to teach American Literature at the University of Wales and later for a time at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York. In 1973 he moved to teach at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he became Professor of English and a founding member of the MMU Writing School before retiring in 2008. In 1984 he was Judith Wilson Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. Wainwright has written many articles and reviews on poetry and two books of criticism, Poetry the Basi (3rd edition 2015) and Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (2005), and has translated plays by Péguy, Corneille, Claudel and Koltès for radio and stage. He has been married to Judith Wainwright since 1967, with whom he has two children and four grandchildren. He has travelled extensively in the USA and Australia, and spends parts of the year in Umbria, Italy.
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