What Must Happen

By Jeffrey Wainwright

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.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784101978

Jeffrey Wainwright

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent, educated locally and at Leeds University where he benefited from the poetry scene sustained by Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, Geoffrey Hill and others. He taught for many years at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also translated drama (from French) and his critical prose includes Poetry the Basics and Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. This is his ninth volume of poetry, all published by Carcanet. He lives with his wife in Manchester and for parts of the year in Umbria and New South Wales.