RESULTS

This anthology of 101 humorous poems includes work by Lewis Carroll, W.S. Gilbert, Gavin Ewart, Kit Wright and Sophie Hannah.

This collection of poems from Wendy Cope reveals a softer lyrical voice, also present in her earlier books, but here given more room to develop in poems about gardens and contentment, and the poignancy of having something to lose.

In the traditional fairy-tale style this book looks at the themes of love and loss by following the experiences of Isis, a river girl, who falls hopelesly in love with a mortal poet. Isis begs her Father, Thames, to free her from the river.

The idea for this book - a new selection of her poems with notes - grew out of Wendy Cope's experience of meeting her audience, when reading her poems in schools. This is an edition of the poems which identifies the references, verse-forms, contexts and occasions of her work, and which offers readers a new arrangement of the poetry as a whole. The notes also identify dates of composition, so that it is possible to observe the development of the work. As well as drawing on Wendy Cope's three published books, the selection also includes a significant number of poems collected or published for the first time.

In a gloriously exuberant anthology, Wendy Cope sets out to prove that misery doesn't have all the best lines. What makes us happy? In her introduction the editor says of the subject-matter of these poems: 'A lot of them are about love - of lovers, spouses, children. There are also poems about places, the beauty of the natural world and the changing seasons, about company and solitude, about music, books, food and drink, and the pleasure of taking a shower. And there are some religious poems.' Among the more surprising items are the Chinese Po Chu-l on the advantages of baldness, the eighteenth-century John Dyer on the kindly behaviour of his ox, and an unusually cheerful Thomas Hardy enjoying the sight of seven women laughing as they stagger, arm in arm, down an icy hill, Catullus, Chaucer, Clare, Dickinson, Betjeman and Larkin are among the contributors who help to demonstrate that people who believe that 'happiness writes white' have got it wrong.