What Must Happen

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 prolific 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, swift and precise, unwilling to rest at an adequate fiction 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.’

About the Author

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 and was educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He has taught at the University of Wales, Long Island University in Brooklyn and for many years at the Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in the Department of English and its Writing School until 2008. His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, Heart's Desire, by Carcanet in 1978. Carcanet Press also publish his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994), Out of the Air (1999) and Clarity or Death! (2008). He has translated plays by Peguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltes' In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999. The play has subsequently been performed by the Actors Touring Company and published by Methuen. Jeffrey Wainwright has published widely on poetry, including Poetry: The Basics (Routledge 2004) and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Acceptable Words (Manchester University Press, 2005).