“Let’s go back to this thing about there being a story,” Wendy Cope says as we sit on a bench by the canal in Ely. “There’s a story of how a depressed primary school teacher became quite a well-known poet.”
She is being characteristically understated. Cope is one of the best-known and among the bestselling British poets of recent decades. Her first collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was full of “the kind of poems journalists enjoy”. As a result, it became, by her own admission, almost too successful. “I’ve never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986,” she says. “I did find it very difficult to cope with all the demands that were being made on me.”
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